Best New Orleans house painter, Jeff Gagnon

This doesn’t have much to do with traveling, but here goes… I have an excellent house painter to recommend in New Orleans. Heck, I’ll scream it from the rooftops. He did a terrific job with my house Uptown (Carrollton), despite a few roadblocks that popped up.

Many neighbors have complimented us on the exterior paint work, and others have raved about this painter’s professional, easy-going attitude.

This recommended New Orleans house painter’s name is Jeff Gagnon of JLG Installations.

Jeff’s slogan is “Committed to Rebuilding Better,” and it shows in his work ethic and in the work itself. You can expect quality workmanship at a reasonable price. He clearly cares about New Orleans, and is doing his part to bring it back stronger than ever. Of course, he’s also a huge Saints fan.

You can contact Jeff at JLGinstall@cox.net for a painless painting estimate if you are in the New Orleans, Metairie or surrounding areas of South Louisiana. He also installs windows and does other handyman-type work.

Please e-mail Jeff, and tell him Dave Baker sent you.

Here’s another review I wrote for the reviewer website Yelp: Jeff Gagnon New Orleans LA Housepainter

OK, so we didn’t exactly plan for our trip to go this way. Things just sort of suddenly spiraled into action late Monday night. I’ve been calling the whole ordeal Operation Blizzard Escape.

When Julie and I, getting ready for bed, glanced at the weather report online, our jaws dropped. “Monster Storm Approaching Northeast,” the headline at Accuweather.com screamed. “Blizzard… Whiteouts… Travel to be severely impacted.” This “February Fury,” as the Weather Channel had already christened it, would be dumping 12 to 18 inches of snow on New York City, and bringing with it punishing 50 mph winds, on the very day we were supposed to take off for our winter vacation to Mexico.

“We have terrible luck,” Julie lamented. “If we were leaving just one day earlier we would have been fine.”

She tried calling Expedia and American Airlines, but the phone lines were tied up for the two hours she waited on hold. Then the call was dropped. So here’s where Operation Blizzard Escape truly kicked in: We searched on our own and found a set of cheap tickets to Miami with Air Tran for the next morning. That flight would leave in just six hours; we’d have to leave for Laguardia airport at 4 in the morning. Why Miami? Because our original flight had a stopover in Miami anyway; we’d just pick up on the Miami-to-Cancun leg on Wednesday morning – so it would be like the blizzard never happened.

Of course, there were some formalities first – we e-mailed our bosses and let them know we wouldn’t exactly be at work on Tuesday; I had a load of midnight laundry to do; we had to sit through an hour of online glitches at the Air Tran website for web check-in; and naturally we had to pack our bags in a hurry – but on Tuesday morning (that is, yesterday morning) we landed at Miami’s airport, well ahead of the storm that was just beginning to brush against New York and Washington, D.C.

Sure enough, most flights leaving out of New York’s airports were later canceled. And all schools were suspended for the day. (Baltimore even ordered all traffic except for emergency vehicles off the city’s highways.) My boss, via e-mail, fretted that she might get stuck at work. So if we hadn’t leaped into action and gotten out of Dodge, we would have been trapped in Brooklyn, peering out the window at the drifting snow, dreaming of Mexico, guacamole, sunny skies and what could have been.

[A word of warning, if you're thinking this plan might work for you: Airlines really, really hate it if you skip one of the legs of your itinerary. They might even declare that by doing so you have invalidated your entire ticket – that's what we were told, before we talked to an American Airlines supervisor who begrudgingly “disappeared” our skipped flight. So tread carefully. This is a “last resort” option for weather emergencies; try calling first. Having said that, if we had followed official airline protocol we would most assuredly not be on this flight high above the Gulf of Mexico today.]

Last night we kicked back in our hotel in Miami. A noisy South Beach-style party raged down on the pool deck outside our window, but we did what we would have been doing at home anyway, watching another episode of the final season of “Lost” on TV. Everything was going to work out just fine.

I will be jetting back to Mexico on Feb. 10-14 with my valentine, Julie. This time we’re heading directly to the coast: Isla Mujeres, off the Yucatan Peninsula on what has become known as “the Mayan Riviera.” This trip should be a timely escape from the winter yuckiness here in New York.

Isla Mujeres is a tiny island (5 miles long, half a mile wide) in the Caribbean within a drunken frat boy’s throw of Cancun. Well, it’s about 8 miles away from Cancun, at any rate, but far quieter. We’ll do a little snorkeling, maybe a day trip to the Mayan ruins at Tulum (about two hours away), commune with the iguanas… but generally just take it easy.

In other news, I’ve added a “subscribe” option for this blog (on the right side of the page). Just enter your e-mail address, and you’ll be notified each time I post a new blog entry. Cancel at any time.

(click on photo to enlarge to its full glory)

To say it’s about 90 degrees (falling only to 80 at night) doesn’t even begin to describe just how hot it is here in St. Thomas, heart of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Heck, I lived in New Orleans for six years, but I wasn’t prepared for the ponderous blanket of humidity that hugged us today as Lucy and Florent exchanged vows outside. Despite the heat, their late-morning ceremony was quite cool: simple and heartfelt. Julie took note of how even the minister snapped a few quick photos of the bride and groom at the gazebo overlooking the Caribbean Sea. It’s hard not to get carried away when you’re surrounded by such natural beauty.

Yesterday the lot of us (family and friends of the newlyweds totaling 14) took a chartered boat to the British Virgin Islands. Virgin Gorda features “the Baths,” imposing natural rock formations with caves and pools. We saw granite boulders jutting out of the earth that were shaped like a skull, a whale, a roaring lion and an elephant’s butt. Meanwhile, Jost Van Dyke, once a pirates’ haven, is now the party isle of the British Virgins, featuring the Soggy Dollar Bar. We also did a little snorkeling in the warm, turquoise waters.

(Photo by Julie Kim; top photo by Dave Baker)

After the wedding, Julie and I took an “open air” safari bus (OK, the back of a pickup truck) to Magens Bay, St. Thomas’s most famous beach, once ranked one of the world’s top 10 by National Geographic. It’s a gorgeous strip of white sand, yes, but I’m not entirely sure you can go wrong with any beach in this area.

And now — well, it’s nap time.