Louisiana Blitz

I had heard legends of the escape rooms in Louisiana. The first mention I encountered was in St. Louis about three years ago. After solving an escape room with a pretty neat design, the owner mentioned that the only rooms cooler than his were in Louisiana.

From that point onward, the accolades stacked. Here and there I encountered owners and other players mentioning rooms in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. I’ve gotten scattered recommendations here and there about places nowhere near me (i.e. someone in Green Bay, WI tells me about a cool room in Corpus Christi, TX), but Louisiana was the most consistently recurrent among my long distance referrals.

It was a blessed coincidence when one of the few seven days cruises the day after our wedding was leaving from New Orleans. We booked the cruise and allowed two additional days to explore the area before heading home.

Fittingly, right after booking our honeymoon there were some incredible flight deals (less than $50 round trip) to New Orleans for quick weekend adventures, and of course I passed on those to save the adventure for the honeymoon.

We took an early flight from Chicago to New Orleans the day after our wedding, but once we arrived at our destination, we hit the ground running. Our Uber driver to our cruise terminal sang for us, and he was pretty darn good. It was a really unexpected treat, and perfect for kicking off our honeymoon.

After going on adventures around the Caribbean, we started the Louisiana leg of the honeymoon. We had a rough start. We had requested a compact car rental to navigate the narrow streets and parallel parking around New Orleans, and of course the rental car business sold their last compact and had to “upgrade” us to a Yukon XL- closer in size to a semi truck cab than a compact.

Just after arriving, we visited the World War II museum. While not traditionally something you’d associate with a puzzle, there was a little bit there in the form of the Enigma machine- the box the Germans used to encode messages so the Allies couldn’t read them. I’ve seen enough references to this box in films and literature, so it was very cool seeing one in person. The museum also had a special Geocache just outside the entrance which involved finding a specific dedication brick in the pavement.

For the rest of our trip, we solved two rooms at Clue Carre in New Orleans and two at 13th Gate in Baton Rouge. Both of these businesses had been recommended to me multiple times in encounters with strangers across the country, and neither disappointed. I’ll write more at length about each of these at a later point. We were very impressed, and there are still many rooms to solve at each of these businesses and others to lure us back to the area at a later date.

The one failing on our part was that we did not try a single beignet in Louisiana. We dined in a few places that had them, but we opted for interesting coffee drinks and meals instead. Though I’m not much of a pastry person, I feel like I missed a core part of the experience of the area, but that’s ok- I’ll save it for next time.