Recently, I spent my 65th birthday (Feb. 28) with Ginny and the ghost of Huck Finn on the Mississippi River.

In our 40 years of married life, the two of us have seldom taken a trip of more than two days' duration, so when we chose, as our first post-retirement trip, with daughter Jessica back in Nevada busily seeking employment in Europe, we decided against the seven and 18-day trips down the Mississippi, and settled for the three-day cruise, which was to depart from New Orleans.

Having successfully escaped southern Arkansas, whose maps evidently didn't want to see us cross its borders, we entered Louisiana in an area that was flat as Oklahoma flanking the Mississippi.

We drove to the Crescent City in two full days of driving, stopping for a brief respite to photograph the little town of Transylvania, La., (honest!), where we bought Jessica a real-life "Transylvania, Louisiana," T-shirt. That first night, we stayed at a motel in Amite, La., and had dinner at a great restaurant, where two large groups of youngish fellows were eating and having genial conversations (although not, of course, at the same time). Ginny had what she then and there -- because they weren't greasy -- declared were "the best ribs I've ever had in my entire life.."

It was raining and grey when we entered New Orleans, Ginny maneuvered us to the hotel where we'd made reservations: the old residence of the French governor. The place for registration was elegant … and dry, if not sunny. But as we followed the bellboy to our room on the third floor, he left the charm of the main lobby and went through a door into the outdoor, unlighted and unroofed garden area, where, among the various fountains and statuary, it was raining chats et chiens. I'm sure there are tourists who demand perfect neatness in their quarters, but we don't leave Nevada, Mo., to renovate houses -- we can do that at home -- and since we welcome the offbeat, we ignored the peeling sheetrock in our room and the rough wall paintings that stood in for real windows (this was an interior, or windowless, room) and planned on running again through the rain and out into the Big Easy for some exquisite bistro for dinner.

When we emerged from the hotel lobby, we heard a loud and attractive wailing saxophone coming from down the street a bit. It sounded faintly like Sidney Bechet, a tenor sax.

And so we followed our ears. The atmosphere of the place from which the sax was floating was the same as a Greenwich Village café. We sat at a small round table midway back in the big room, and even though there was a big and noisy crowd, whenever the little band finished a number, I clapped as loudly as I could, drawing appreciative nods from the band and laughter from the rest of the room.

The next morning we drove to the more than century-old Museum of the Confederacy, popularly known as the Museum of the South. It was a stark, impressive red-sandstone structure, each of whose two front corner columns look like the inverted hull of the Confederate iron-clad Merrimac. The museum was not ADA-equipped, but I asked the young man at the front desk if there was any way I could get my motorized scooter inside. I said I'd grown up in New York, but that my family now lived in Missouri … the Southern part of Missouri.

He said he was a native of New Orleans, then smiled. That being established, he kindly offered to go to the curb and pick up my scooter and carry it up to the museum. The building housed all the official documents of the Confederate regime from 1861 through 1865. Of special interest to me, however, were all the pistols, rifles, and cannons manufactured and used by the South. After all that, we got to watch a video that recorded the last few reunions of the Confederate veterans of the Civil War. It was fascinating.

I thought the Confederate museum was well worth visiting. Across the plaza is the recently opened National D-Day Museum, the main project of American historian Stephen Ambrose, in the last decade of his life, organized to tell the story of the momentous invasion from Germany's occupation of western Europe onward. I found I wasn't learning much I didn't already know, but I found my observation of the elderly American men shepherding those who must have been their grandsons and great-grandsons compelling. By the end of our three-hour visit, I could have sworn that today's American population consisted of at least 70 percent males older than 80 years of age and youngsters between 10 and 15 years.

"How did you like it?" I asked Ginny at the end of the afternoon. Why did I ask?

"I guess I'm not into war things," she answered.

That night we had dinner at a wonderful French restaurant, which, as a private residence in the early 19th century, had been offered to Napolean Bonaparte on his retreat into ignominy.

That meal was great. Every once in a while, you just need to splurge, without a care for the cost.

The next morning, waiting for Ginny to drive the car out of the parking lot and up to the front of the hotel, I was sitting in the lobby listening in on a gaggle of casually dressed pretty young women who were arriving to stay at our hotel to attend a convention of physical therapists.

One of them suddenly turned to the rest and said, "I've got to go upstairs and change for the meetings this afternoon;" and one of the bellboys, standing by, replied, "Change? Change? This is New Orleans, The Big Easy. Nobody changes here. Hey, you all look fine just the way you are!"

When it was time to leave New Orleans for our cruise, Ginny successfully got us to the wharf from where our ship, the American Queen, was to depart. We bordered and made ourselves comfortable in our riverside third-deck room. That night, after dinner, when nearly everyone else had gone to bed, I sat on the deck for a while pretending to be Huckleberry Finn. But it warn't no use, 'cause I didn't have no raft and there warn't no lights from shore nor any other boats floatin' in the other direction.

The next day the boat stopped at Oak Alley Plantation, a beautiful plantation house built between two rows of 28 ancient and lovely live oak trees. With help from two or three of the sternwheeler's helpers I got my motorized red scooter down the gangplank, onto the smooth, brick walkway and up to the plantation house called Oak Alley. The two costumed young women who acted as guides took us into the first-floor sun room, then into the dining room, and after that upstairs, where I, with my scooter, could not go.. So, while the rest of the tourists in my group were upstairs, I chatted with the two young guides downstairs in the hall and looked at a book about Oak Alley that they thoughtfully got for me. I think it was a very informative tour that gave one a fair sense of how the Louisiana gentry really lived. in the antebellum years. Next, our bus took us on a tour of a fairly nearby swamp, where our tour guide there was truly a swamp fox named Roland Torres, (he has his own website), who has spent all his life in that area. He is an alligator hunter, who makes his living off their hides and meat.

The next day, the American Queen docked at Baton Rouge, capital of the state of Louisiana, and all who were interested went ashore and got involved in a mock "jazz funeral" for Huey Long, Governor of the state until an assassin's fusillade of bullets brought him down on the floor of the state housein 1936.

We had a good look at the spectacular interior of the state house.

On board our boat that evening, which was to be the last night before returning to New Orleans, after a meal which was to be the piece de resistance, but which to my taste proved less than satisfactory, we were entertained by a superb cajun band and stand-up comedian.

When our steamboat returned to the port of New Orleans, Ginny and I hunted down some quality pralines which we'd promised Jessica.

When we got off the boat, we got in the car and took the ferry across the Mississippi River to the island of Algiers and, specifically, to Mardi Gras World, where a crew spends the working days constructing floats and masks for Mardi Gras. Ginny loved this, of course.

After lunch at the same bistro where we had dinner a night before, we returned to the road and headed back for Missouri.