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Naw'leans Part 1 - Beads and More Beads

Starting our stay at St. Bernard State Park. The park is 4 feet below sea level and is about as close to the Gulf of Mexico as you can get. Our campsite is delightfully swampy and features a nearby railroad crossing which sings us to sleep with its late night clanging. We are here for 5 nights to experience New Orleans or, as I've been corrected once or twice, N'awlens. We rushed down here to experience some of the Mardi Gras festivities. These include multiple parades each day of the weekend. We decided to skip the actual festival due to crowds and my selfish desire to see a rocket launch in Cape Canaveral.

Our first parade was more of a small town experience in the Pearl River parish (I love the term parish for some reason, seems very quaint). We were able to pull up our car right beside the parade route. The local church was dishing out free jambalaya and popcorn and we started chatting with our neighbours (a NASA engineer and his family). Fortunate for us, they knew everyone on the floats so they would get all sorts of stuff (beads, bouncy balls, recorders, more beads, cups, frisbees, stuffies and more) and they would give everything to the kids. Apparently once you live in New Orleans for a bit, you have all the beads you will ever need. The parade was great. Marching bands, crazy tricked out ATVs, local dance troupes and small floats. The kids partially filled our wagon full of beads and we sat around chatting and having some food. 


 To maximize our time, we left one parade to go to another parade. This was 'Tit Rex. We didn't really know what we were getting in for but we showed up an hour late and waited around for quite a while thinking we might have missed the parade. The crowd slowly grew until the flashing lights of police cars announced the parades arrival. It turns out that 'Tit was short form for petit (which I suspected but others thought it might have a dirtier conotation). The floats could fit inside a large box and were pulled by their creators. They handed out small packages of seeds, umbrellas, pieces of paper with various QR codes on them and candy. An emergency midway through the parade saw a miniature detour created where miniature barriers were set up to protect the floats from hitting a miniature pile of garbage and the parade was detoured to one side of the street. 

 At this point it was late so back to the trailer for another chilly night although it has been getting warmer. Maybe we have found our warmth finally. The downside to this is the trailer is starting to heat up uncomfortably in the morning, we might be getting more than we wished for.

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