Don't sweat the small stuff (but you probably will sweat in New Orleans)

If you forget something, the Riverwalk shopping center is just across from the hotel.

Sweat? It's the 14th of June and I'm bundled in polar fleece, wondering if the thermometer here on the New England coast is ever going to break through the 70-degree ceiling. My peonies want to bloom, but they're afraid. "Are you sure it's not going to snow again?" they seem to be asking as they shiver in the wind. I ask myself that questions some days.

New Orleans is having the opposite problem. I spoke with a friend there today who told me that the temperature was well into the 90s.

It hasn't been that hot here in years.

So of course I'll have all the wrong clothes for a sub-tropical city when I arrive, but one thing I remember about the convention center is the Riverwalk shopping center right outside our hotel. So if you bring the wrong clothes...or just want to go shopping for some new right clothes, you'll find plenty of options right outside the door.

The usual Gap-BodyShop-Brookstone core of shops will be there so you can also replace the basics that you may have forgotten or that the airline may have lost, or make up for that suitcase of sweats you packed when you scoffed, "How hot can it be down there?"

Click here to see a list of the stores in the Riverwalk. There's also a Saks Fifth Avenue further down the street at Canal Place, if you're up for a bigger splurge. If you walk all the way to the end of the Riverwalk, you'll be at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, which is worth a visit and is offering a yoga class in front of the huge open ocean tank on Saturday morning that sounds like fun. "Namaste, y'all!"

You'll sweat even more if you sample some of the hot sauces for sale in the French Quarter.

For me, shopping in New Orleans isn't about clothes, once I have the right ones for the right weather. It's about going in and out of the odd little shops of the French Quarter and looking for hot sauces and voodoo and music and art. The French Quarter is only about a ten or fifteen minute walk from the hotel, according to where in the French Quarter you're headed.

Just click here to keep an eye on the weather in New Orleans over the next ten days.

Thanks to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau for the use of these photos.