Krewe Parades in New Orleans

Tuesday we drove around the St. Bernard area before going to New Orleans.  Some of the houses in that area look like they are still trashed from Katrina.  I am sure that I don’t understand all the issues, but I cannot really comprehend why, 7 years later, so many houses should be abandoned like that.  I can understand why some owners would want to just walk away, but leaving property to decay affects the whole neighborhood.  As a former home-owner, I know that can be heartbreaking.

Anyway - back to the fun.  In New Orleans that day we played tourist.  Here's a fence so unique that they named the hotel after it - the Cornstalk Fence Hotel.

We got some good cookies at Rouses grocery store, and in an other retail store we learned about Absinthe. It has been illegal to sell Absinthe in the U.S. since 1915, but in 2007 the ban was lifted.  Now Absinthe sets are supposed to be very popular in New Orleans; at $300 a set, they are pretty popular with store owners, too. 

We usually go to the Acme Oyster Company to get oysters, but we decided to try another place so we went across the street to Felix, where we and ordered raw oysters and red beans and rice with grilled sausage.  Wow, it was so good - very flavorful, not too spicy.  Randy mixed up some horseradish sauce for us, and he did warn me to taste it to see if it was too hot.  I didn’t take his advice, I just spread a lot on an oyster and ate it, and I thought my face would fall off!  But after I realized I wasn't going to die, I enjoyed several more oysters, topped with just a little bit of horseradish sauce.  I'd give a grade of A+ to everything. 

After dinner we walked back to the car; New Orleans can be so surreal, especially at night.

On our last day in New Orleans we made it a point to get to Johnny’s before they closed, to get that muffaletta.  It was just as good as we remembered, and this time I didn’t pick the olives off!

We made one more trip to Cafe du Monde for more Beignets, then went to find a place to watch the parade.  To get into the right spirit, Randy got a hat with bells and I got electric bunny ears.  Happy Mardi Gras!

We had a couple of hours to wait before the parades started.  Fortunately we met some friendly folks to help pass the time.  I started hanging around with two ladies from Arizona, who had traveled here for Mardi Gras and met up with a daughter, grand-daughter and grand-niece.  A store owner brought out some chairs for us, then set up a sound system and started playing music.  Theresa, the daughter, who was a little younger than me, started dancing in the street long before the parade started.  She was so much fun; when someone walked by, she would trail behind them, dancing until she was noticed, then run back to her place and start again.  She is sure to show up on some You Tube videos!  Randy met Eddy, Ronnie, and Ronnie's wife Deanna, and had a great time with them.  Then a few other guys joined them for some talking and some beer drinking.  Not sure which one they did more of, but I could take a guess….

I didn’t take many pictures that night because it was raining a good bit.  That makes for bad pictures, as well as ruining the camera.  Plus, when I was taking pictures, I couldn’t catch beads.  So for once I didn’t worry about capturing the moment, I just had a good time. There were actually two parades that night.  The first one was "Druid Phobias", put on by Krewe of Druids.   There were lots of floats, bands, and beads, and the rain did not stop the fun.  We caught a lot of beads, and the people we were hanging out with were determined to give us the full Mardi Gras experience, so they started giving us most of the beads that they caught.  Pretty soon we were covered with beads, and it is surprising how heavy those beads can get!.  Fortunately about that time someone on the float threw us a couple of plastic bags, so we started loading those up. 

There was about 30 minutes between parades.  The guy with the sound system had been waiting for this - he jacked the sound way up and started playing dance music.  When “Cupid Shuffle” started, I left the sidewalk and joined the dancers in the street.  The wonderful thing about the Cupid Shuffle is that the song actually tells you what steps to do, so anyone can do it.  It was so much fun that I stayed out for some more songs.  It's been a long time since I did the Macarena!

The second parade was The Krewe of NYX.  

By the time it came along, it was raining pretty steady.  We didn’t care, we just stood out in the rain, yelling for beads and applauding the bands.  Those kids were marching in the rain, but they just kept on going, and put on a great show.

One nice guy decided to explain the parade to us and get us as many different beads as possible.  He kept running over to us with unusual beads or throws, and telling us about the floats and bands.  He said that one of the best "throws" was a purse from one of the NYX floats, and he made sure we got one.  Randy got a lot of cool stuff, too.  By now the people on the floats were tossing full bags of beads.  And our new friends on both sides of the street gave us those, too.  We ended up with about 50 or 60 pounds of beads, and it was a 2 mile walk back to the car, in the rain.  No worries - we had a wonderful time!