Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

I asked Toren to do something one night but he was busy.  How did he respond?  He put up one finger and said, “One sec.”

Despite having been to New Orleans at least twice before, neither Debi or I had ever had a beignet.  So, we made a special trip to Cafe Dumond before driving back to Tampa to pick up some beignets.  Toren and Debi loved them:

Eating a beignet in New Orleans. Not sure about the creepy guy in the background.

Me?  I thought they were okay, but a little too sugary for my taste.

We took Toren to the zoo while we were there.  It’s a nice zoo; very large.  But Toren didn’t seem extremely interested, though it could have been lack of sleep.

He did get his picture taken with the Buddha:

This was about the happiest he was the whole time we were at the zoo.

To entertain Toren on the ride up we put Star Wars – The Clone Wars on his tablet.  That, of course, led him to pretend to be a Jedi the entire time we were there.  Every stick he found was either a light saber or a laser gun, like the one in the photo below he is using to shoot me with from behind a tree:

I don't love that he's learning to shoot, but at least he's learning good tactics!

While we did spend a fair amount of time at the conference, we also found time to sneak out with Toren to see some of New Orleans.  We caught a movie at the aquarium… Well, Debi and I did.  Toren was so exhausted from not taking a nap that he fell asleep about 5 minutes in.  It was a good flick:

He was so tired he didn't even care when his glasses slipped off his face.

We went out that night to a nice Creole restaurant called Olivier’s.  The salad dressing is probably the best I’ve ever had.  And all of us loved the corn bread, but Toren did in particular:

Toren gobbling down his second helping of corn bread

In early April Debi and I had a conference in New Orleans where we presenting a poster with one of my students.  Since both of us were going, we decided it would be easiest to rent a car and drive to take Toren with us.  To break up the drive, which is about 11 hours, we got a hotel in Sandestin via Priceline (nice deal!) on the way there and the way back.  We ended up at a Marriott that is part of a resort.  We didn’t spend much time at the beach, but did make a visit to the private access beach of the resort in the morning before driving to New Orleans.  Here are a couple of shots of Toren enjoying the very nice beach:

Toren would have kept on walking if we didn't tell him we had to drive to New Orleans.

He brought a shovel, and found another at the beach. It was heaven for him!