Fat Tuesday

Fat Tuesday, mark it off the bucket list, an experience beyond all others.

We were warned to go early, parade was not until 1pm but we left the coach at 9:30am and
you bet it was a mob already everywhere, so amazing. By the time the parade started there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people. We had our chairs right at the front and were all set, and guess what 10 minutes into the parade we were 5 or 6 rows back but we were so lucky the group that got in front of us were about 30 to 40 college students out for one hell of a time. And yes that included the flashing of the boobs, so just when we thought we would not get beads today we got so many more as the students did not want the beads and kept loading our bags. They included us in their fun and we enjoyed their energy. Two and a half hours long of constant floats throwing beads, even full bags of beads, the college students liked the more exotic beads so we did not get many of those.

The crowd is gathering and we are in front.

Here it comes.

Now we are already being pushed back but the floats are so high in the air to get the beads out.

Some of our crowd, to bad we really could not see what the floats looked like.


Some were pretty elaborate

Our crowd

The mess after, if you look close you will see the thousands of beads left behind, Ron would not let me pick them all up. I must have some of Grannie Leona in me, what a waste.

It took 3 hours to get the crowd dispersed, so intead of trying to get to the other parade we went to a couple casino, had a fabulous steak and crab dinner and lost a few dollars in the machines.

When we got home I took a picture of the beads in the box of the truck, will not count them until tomorrow, I am sure I have enough to go around.