six nights, a hotel base, two days the dog sits out
Dog Friendly New Orleans Vacation Package With Six Nights On The River Road
This is a dog friendly New Orleans vacation package that tells you up front which two days your dog is shut out of, and what the other four look like from six in the morning.
Six nights, from $1,690 per person.
Nothing here counts you and nothing follows you off the page. One word can be stored, and only the word yes, so this slip stops coming back. The whole of what that means.
The river road runs about seventy miles on the east bank from Kenner up to Baton Rouge, and it is the reason this itinerary exists. It is a two lane road behind a grass levee, the levee is public, and almost the whole length of it is walkable with a leash. You drive a stretch, you park on the shoulder, you climb twelve feet of mown slope, and there is the Mississippi doing about three miles an hour a hundred yards below you. Nobody charges for that and nobody asks about the dog.
What we sell here is a dog friendly New Orleans vacation package with a fixed hotel base and your own car, six nights, and a route you drive yourself. The base is a room in the Lower Garden District or Mid City, ground floor with its own exit to the street, which matters at eleven at night more than any other feature of the room. From there the river road is forty minutes west and the Quarter is a twelve minute drive or a twenty five minute walk.
The honest part first. Two of the six days are closed to your dog completely, and they are the two days most people picture when they picture New Orleans. That is why the figure on this page is the lowest one we publish.
- How far the dog comes
- Your dog comes on four of the six days in full, rides the river road with you both ways, and stays in the room on the two city days.
- What is actually included
- Six nights in a pet accepting hotel room with a ground floor exit; the dog fee for the length of the stay, paid by us in advance so you are not settling it at the desk; a written river road driving route with three plantation-era river towns, mileages and where the shade is; a levee path map with parking that is free and legal; a printed list of thirty two courtyards and patios that seat dogs, sorted by how early they open.
- What the dog is shut out of
- Two full days, roughly nine hours each, eighteen hours across the week. Day three is the French Quarter and the museums on foot; day five is the aquarium, the Garden District house tours and the streetcar. Neither admits dogs and neither has shade you would want to leave one in, so your dog is in the room those days and you go without. Every other listed item on the six nights was checked by phone in the past year and admits dogs on leash.
- What it does not include
- Airfare or any travel to and from Louisiana; the car, its fuel, its parking downtown at roughly $38 a night, and the tolls on the Sunshine Bridge crossing; all food and drink for you and for the dog; museum, aquarium and house tour admissions on the two closed days; anything your own veterinarian handles, which is not our office; damage charges the property bills you directly at checkout.
- Who should not book this
- A dog that cannot be left alone in a hotel room for a nine hour stretch without vocalizing, twice in one week. Also anyone booking June through August who wants midday walking: pavement in that window runs hot enough that our own route pushes everything before nine in the morning and after six at night, and that is a real constraint on the shape of the day, not a caveat.
The room, the levee and the hard hot pavement in between
The properties we place people in are mid range hotels, not apartments, and that is a deliberate compromise. A whole house would let the dog have the run of it, but house inventory in this city sits in the Bywater and the Marigny, which puts you forty minutes from the levee and in a neighborhood built for walking rather than parking. A hotel room with street access and a paid dog fee is the trade that makes the driving days work.
Ground conditions vary more than the map suggests. The levee crown is mown grass, dry, roughly a hundred feet wide, and it goes on for miles without a gate. City Park in Mid City is 1,300 acres with a fenced run at the north end and live oaks that hold real shade past noon. Audubon Park has a two mile loop that is asphalt the whole way, which in July means it holds heat until well after sunset; the grass either side of it does not. Downtown sidewalk is brick and slate, radiant, and it is the single surface that ends walks early in this town.
Water is the other governing fact. You are at or below sea level, the humidity sits in the eighties most of the year, and a dog that would walk four miles in Colorado will want two here. We route accordingly, and the printed patio list is sorted by opening hour for exactly that reason: nine of those thirty two courtyards are serving by seven in the morning.
from $1,690per person
- Behind the number
- The least this office has paid to put a party into this week during the past year, not a rate card.
- Counted how
- Per head, two sharing, one dog, and that dog's lodging supplement folded in here instead of appearing at the door.
- Pushes it up
- Taking a whole place rather than a room, bringing a second dog, a holiday week, a property that prices by the size of the animal, and deciding late.
- Goes firm
- The moment a property puts its own name to a written line saying it will take your dog on those exact dates.
You settle up with the property itself, through whatever system it happens to use. None of it routes through this office and no card is ever shown to anybody here.
When the calendar cooperates and when it flatly does not
October through early December is the window this trip was designed around. Highs sit in the seventies, the humidity drops off, and the levee is walkable at any hour of the day. Late February and March are nearly as good, with the caveat that the last two weeks before Mardi Gras put parade barricades across half the routes downtown and the crowds are not a place to have a dog on a six foot leash.
May to September is the opposite. Highs run 90 to 95 with a heat index above 100 most afternoons, and there is a thunderstorm somewhere in the parish nearly every day between two and five. We will book it, people do book it, but the day becomes two short ends with a long shut-in middle, and you should know that before you pay rather than after.
- March
- highs 72 to 78, low humidity, levee open and dry underfoot
- Late April
- highs mid eighties, mosquitoes begin on the levee at dusk
- June to August
- highs 90 to 95, heat index past 100, daily afternoon storms, walking before 9am and after 6pm only
- September
- peak of hurricane season, itineraries get moved more often this month than all others combined
- October to early December
- the best of it: seventies, dry, full days outdoors
- Late January to Mardi Gras
- parade season, barricades across downtown routes, dense crowds
What gets nailed down before you pay anything
Nothing is held until the property has confirmed your dog in writing, by weight and by number, and until the dog fee is settled from this end. We do that because the desk charge is where this kind of trip goes wrong: people arrive with a verbal yes from a call in April and meet a $150 non refundable pet charge in November.
- QuestionYou tell us the travel month, the dog's weight, and whether it can be left alone in a room. We say plainly whether the two closed days will work for you.
- FigureTwo to four working days for a written quote with the room type, the fee already included, and the route.
- Written confirmationThe property confirms the dog in writing before anything is held. The confirmation names the weight ceiling and the exit you will be using.
- DocumentsRoute sheet, levee parking map and the patio list arrive about three weeks out, with the current construction closures on Highway 44 marked.
Tell us the month and the weight
Say what month you are looking at and how heavy your dog is, and say honestly how it handles a closed door. A message here is read the same working day, and if this is the wrong trip for your dog we would rather tell you that in the first reply than in the confirmation.