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Neon Training Course and Weekend In New Orleans After a catastrophic product failure in the Gulf of Mexico, a training course was organised to go over the mistakes which were made and try to raise awareness. The job had been run from Houma, Louisiana so that's where the course was to take place. I managed to join in with the course as I had been involved in the post failure investigation. The trip started with the standard 12-24 hours of travelling to get from the Southampton to Houma, LA. The following week was spent looking at the product and then going out to big dinners at night with management from Houston. We had a couple of late nights and some serious Cajun style food along the way. On the base in Houma I met quite a few people who I'd worked with before in different places but due to offshore commitments they weren't able to join us for the weekend. One was an American guy who I had worked with in Baku; there was also another American guy and an Australian girl who I worked with when I was in France. With the course over on Friday three of us from Southampton changed hotels and headed into New Orleans for the weekend. We had hoped to get rooms in the Royal Sonesta hotel which we were informed was the place to be, unfortunately they were booked out and Schlumberger only have guaranteed reservations with that hotel during the week. We ended up in the InterContinental hotel which was a 5 to 10 minute walk from Bourbon Street... not on it like the Sonesta :-) On the Friday night we went down Bourbon Street and visited a few different "jazz clubs". Here is a video of one of the places we visited - Random Jazz Band - 305MB. The night finished in the early hours of the morning after we visited a few more places. On the Saturday morning we had a walk around New Orleans and ended up in a day time jazz club on one of the other major roads for lunch. On all our travels we didn't really see any evidence of flood damage from when the levy broke and flooded the city; you'd probably have to go a bit further off the beaten track to see where people had just given up and left the flood damage. Saturday night was spent down Bourbon Street and there were beads being thrown around everywhere ;-) It wasn't even Mardi Gras! On the Sunday, two of us flew back to the UK and the other went onto Houston for a few days. We landed in Heathrow at 6:30am on Monday morning and due to my lack of sleep I ended up working from home and not risking driving to work. |