New Orleans practicalities.

Prices in shops and on menus are shown before tax, and the tax is added at the till. The City of New Orleans publishes the combined rate: 10% on tangible goods, made up of 5% Louisiana state tax and 5% Orleans Parish tax. Hotel rooms carry more: the combined hotel and motel tax is 15% for properties with ten or more rooms and 17% for smaller ones, before the small per-night occupancy charge. Food and prescription drugs bought to take away are taxed at a reduced combined 4.5%. The full table is on the city's own sales tax page.

Tipping is custom, not law, and it is how service staff are paid. The usual working range in restaurants is 15 to 20 percent of the pre-tax bill for table service, a dollar or two per drink at a bar, and a few dollars for the taxi and the hotel porter, the flat-rate airport taxi included. Cards are accepted almost everywhere; the airport taxis are required to take them.

New Orleans is on Central Time, the same clock as Chicago and Houston, an hour behind the East Coast and two ahead of the West Coast. Festival days run to that clock: Jazz Fest's gates, the parade roll times and the Saints' kickoffs on this calendar are all Central, and the This Weekend page turns over on Central Time too.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, the dates NOAA publishes, and it overlaps the city's summer and autumn. In practice: trips in those months are planned with an eye on the forecast in the week before travel, bookings worth protecting are made refundable where the price allows, and a named storm heading for the Gulf is a reason to move dates rather than to watch and wait. The city's own emergency pages at ready.nola.gov carry the local word during any storm, and event pages here are updated when organisers move dates.

Summer heat organises the day the way the family page puts it: outdoor miles first, in the morning, a museum or the Aquarium at midday, and the evening for the streets and the music. Carry water, take the shade side of the street, and let the streetcar do the long legs; the 1-Day Jazzy Pass at $3 makes hopping on and off the cheap option as well as the cool one. Light rain arrives most summer afternoons and passes; a parade or a festival day is rarely cancelled for it, and the locals do not dress for it so much as step under a gallery until it blows through.

The legal drinking age in Louisiana is 21, and bars and shops check ID, visitors included; carry photo ID you are comfortable having scanned at a door. Venues set their own door policies on top of the law, and some clubs are 21 and over for entry regardless of whether you drink.

The ordinary big-city rules apply, stated plainly: stay on lit, busy streets at night, keep the phone and wallet put away between uses, use the taxi ranks and ride apps rather than accepting rides offered at the curb, and let the hotel hold the valuables you do not need for the night. The French Quarter and the main hotel districts are busy late, which is its own comfort.

For the trip in, the getting there page covers the airport ride and the streetcars; for the stay itself, the hotels page compares the four areas to sleep in.