YOLO at Mardi Gras in MS and AL, Feb 2022

Grand Isle, Louisiana was to be our next stop.  It was the last inhabited barrier island, but Hurricane Ida blasted it in August of 2021 and left no building undamaged.  Silly us, we didn't know; folks had just told us what a great place it was to park and stay on the beach.  And since we'd been liking the beach parking locales, we decided to try this one, too.  Unfortunately, the damage was so great that they had closed the state park to the public and were using the space to put up workers trying to clear the hurricane debris and start the rebuild process.  It was a mess!

We parked overnight next to a flatbed truck in a little pull-out at a curve in the road.  We couldn't stay here.  There was no place for us to park; it looked like a war zone.  The entire place was under construction after the total destruction and traffic was stopped repeatedly to give the big machinery room to move and do their thing.  We found a public beach access road and stopped for a minute to see what the place looked like on the ocean side.  Jason posing on the beach side. 

Nothing went unscathed.  It was depressing.

Much of the debris ended up in the surrounding waters and wetlands.  

Twisted metal

bent/broken beams

beached tugboats.

We had to endure the long traffic stops and the long stretches of raised roads and bridges to get back off the island.  We stopped to buy a birthday card at a Dollar Tree store.  Every single envelope in their entire card display was sealed shut!  I had to tear one open to use it.  The clerk explained that the high humidity while the store was closed up for the recent hurricane was the cause, but there was nothing they would do about it.

Mardi Gras was just around the corner and even the schools started decorating with beads and trinkets.

We spent the night at a park where you just drive into a big open area under the trees and park wherever you want. 

 

Nearby is the the Honey Swamp with these magical cypress trees with their 'knees' poking out of the swamp water.  Tours of the swamp are available, but most of the creatures they advertise that you might see can be seen around our cottage.  Alligators were the exception, but we saw plenty of those along the canals and ditches in Louisiana.

With Mardi Gras, each community has their own parade, so the parades cover many weeks leading up to the actual Fat Tuesday.  We'd stopped to do our laundry in Waveland, Mississippi and heard their parade was the next day, so we just hung around in Pass Christian and came back to park in the laundromat lot the following day to watch the parade.  We set up early, as advised, while regular traffic was still driving on the parade route.

Jason set up early to watch.

The only black cop we saw was related to the only group of black folks we saw, who decided to set up in right front of us.

The crowd builds around Jason.

One of the first floats to come by.

Loved the gold shoes on these two guys in the bucket of a tractor.

More floats

The guy in this float brought his inflatable mate-able doll with him.

Beads, bags, balls, toys and candy were flung from the floats.  If you didn't pay attention, you could get clobbered by a handful of necklaces or Moon Pies.  If they couldn't get the necklaces untangled fast enough, they would throw the entire wad --ouch.   Afterwards the street looked like someone puked up a rainbow.

Broken bead necklaces littered the street.  Many of the necklaces broke when they hit the pavement, but there were lots of them that were still intact, too.

My haul of bead necklaces from the parade.  A full grocery bag plus balls, frisbee rings, toys, and other associated junk thrown from the floats.  

Near the bridge over Bay St. Louis, these cool bas-relief panels adorned the roadway.

Across the bridge, we ended up in Pass Christian and Gulfport.  That's the Gulfport casino at the end of the sidewalk where I won $20 that afternoon.

We stayed near the marina and this community area.  Here the morning fog makes the area look all grey.  We asked a passing policeman if it was okay for us to park here; he said we'd be fine as long as nobody complains.  He doesn't enforce any no parking rules and didn't seem to care at all.

We moved on to look for a camp site.  We found one, but it was still smoldering from a 'prescribed burn', so we moved to the next closest one.  This was the POW Lake Recreation Area Campground near Saucier, MS.  It was used to house Italian and German prisoners in WWII, but these ammo bunkers are all we saw that remains.

The billboard here warns us of alligators so we gave the lake a miss.

The ammo bunkers have been colored by graffiti.

The next stop was just a bike trailhead with a big parking/camping area.  This guy was working on his 'jet kayak' and Jason went to talk to him and investigate the unusual vessel.  Meanwhile, I was talking with a local who'd come to hunt squirrel.  He ended up filling me in on Mississippi's gun laws (even though I told him we didn't carry guns and we didn't need to know).   He insisted we should have a gun, and then proceeded to tell me about his extraterrestrial encounters and experiences, some while he worked for the government.  It became a bit of a woo-woo moment.

We like parking in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nature.  As long as we can be level, we're good.

Mississippi and Alabama don't last long as you traverse the coast, and before we knew it, we were in Florida.  

What a sunset.

  Another pretty sunset over the soft white sand.