Got lost driving around the Garden District. Wish we had taken the walking tour. Great old homes and beautifully decorated for the holidays. Worth seeing if you like old houses and charming sites.

When we rode the St Charles Streetcar, it took us through the Garden District. The map I had showed a self-walking tour of some of these old mansions, so we got off and took the self tour. It was fun and it brought us back around to the streetcar stop.

We headed out there by trolley, which was a fun way to go bypassing the formatted, paid tour company tours. We headed first to the Garden District Bookstore, which we loved. They were very helpful and had lots of cool stuff about the area. This is where Ann Rice does her book signings as she lives in the area. It was easy to tour around by yourselves with one person guiding the way and reading the descriptions of the homes.

The Garden District Book Shop not far from author Anne Rice''s home is a must visit for any book collector. It''s within a small mall of stores, and it''s an independent bookstore worth going out of the way to see.

In addition to hosting frequent signings by writers like New Orleans own Goth Queen, the shop keeps important, signed first editions for purchase in a special bookcase on the side wall. The first editions of The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides I bought bearing Pat Conroy''s signature ended up costing me more than my share of our hotel room! Ouch! But I was thrilled to find them.

If your budget doesn''t allow for a collector''s itch, no worries. As you wander the aisles you''ll see lots of signed books at the regular, original hardcover prices that aren''t in the "special" bookcase. I ran my thumb over signatures by notable authors like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Connelly, and others.

In the back of the store you''ll see a wall covered in snapshots, a virtual "who''s who" of the literary scene that you don''t want to miss. As a writer myself, it was fun to pick out the faces I knew, while making it a personal goal to one day sign books of my own in this store. Happy shopping!

Three words are used to describe the Garden District: elegant, lavish, and historic. There are several tour companies that conduct tours of the Garden District in New Orleans, but our timeshare was located there so we grabbed our map and set off on our own. It is not a huge area and you can do justice to seeing most of the sights on foot within a couple of hours.

The Garden District has an eerie, lush, almost tropical feel to it. You can definitely feel like you are in the Gone With the Wind movie as you walk the narrow, uneven sidewalks. The sidewalks are very old and the roots of the huge old trees have upended many of the blocks.

The day we walked in this area, we did not see another person for over one and a half hours. The houses almost looked deserted and almost sad, as though they'd seen a lot over the years. Many of the mansions are still strikingly beautiful with ivy covered walls and stonework. They are very large with typical southern columns and porticos encircled with the classic New Orleans ornate iron scrollwork on the balconies.

You can get to the Garden District by riding the streetcar from the French Quarter, downtown, or within the Garden District itself down St. Charles Avenue and getting off at one of the many stops. I don't think would be an area that you'd want to be walking around at night. The Garden District area is south of the St. Charles and the area north looks pretty rough. Many ghost and vampire novels are set in this mystical area.

It began as a suburb of New Orleans in the 1830s and large mansions were built on large tracts of land before the Civil War. After the war, smaller houses filled in the areas between the larger homes. Within this area is Lafayette Cemetery with a history all its own, the house were Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, died, and homes for famous authors and musicians.

While this may not be an exciting journey, it is nonetheless an enjoyable way to spend a few hours to get the sense of what life must have been like in the age of elegance and southern charm.