Gulf Coast of Alabama and Louisiana, the Mardi Gras Circuit

We left the state of Florida, and headed off to Alabama, aiming for the Gulf Shores State Park.  Alas, we were turned away there, one of the few times we have not been able to get into our chosen RV park.  But it turned out OK.  We were able to locate a terrific city park on Dauphin Island outside of Mobile.  Dauphin is a barrier island outside Mobile Bay and has an Audubon bird sanctuary right next to it, with beaches and bay within walking distance on both sides.  There is also excellent biking and birdwatching.  The park itself is a haven for northerners who come down for the winter, as it allows stays of up to six months.  The sites were almost all taken by folks from the likes of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, who were retired and down for the winter.  They were very sociable and had lots of potlucks and fish-fries, to which we were kindly invited.  The seafood here, by the way, was fabulous, with lots of gulf shrimp and shellfish for sale fresh off the boats.

We spent a day in Mobile, visiting the sights.  It was early Mardi Gras, and the city prides itself on being the "original" Mardi Gras site, before New Orleans.  It turns out that Dauphin Island was the original capital of the French Louisiane territory.  After the first hurricane, the capital was quickly moved inland to Mobile, and later transferred to New Orleans.  But Mobile started the Mardi Gras tradition, which is still very much in evidence.  Theirs is a more family friendly, less touristy, and less drunken version of the New Orleans ceremony.  We also visited the Museum of Mobile, which had some well thought out historical exhibits chronicling the development of the area from the cotton era to the present.  A treat.

Leaving here, we headed to Louisiana, for a stay in New Orleans.  We had located an RV park out along Lake Pontchartrain, in an area that is a bit industrial but much cheaper than the park in the French Quarter, which is hugely expensive, particularly during Mardi Gras.  Our park was quite reasonable and close to the downtown area.  We spent most of our time in the city itself, enjoying the urban world for a change.  We saw a couple of Mardi Gras parades, and visited with a friend from Seattle, who showed us around for a day.  We got acquainted with Magazine Street, a charming local area outside the French Quarter, with a lot of good restaurants, a French bakery, and a New York bagel bakery.  You can see that food was very much a theme in our visit to the Big Easy.


A surprise was the New Orleans Museum of Art, which we liked very much.  They had an excellent collection of paintings and a sculpture garden that was one of the best we've ever seen.  We also visited the Louisiana State Museum, with its extensive exhibit around Hurricane Katrina and the history of severe weather events in New Orleans.  We saw a very nice jazz group down on Frenchmen Street, one of the quieter areas for music right next to the French Quarter.  We found that we had little tolerance for the level of loud and drunken partying in the French Quarter and could only tolerate the area for a short time.

It was sad to see how much damage New Orleans still exhibits, even five years or more after the hurricane.  As you drive around the city outside the French Quarter, there are large areas that are still leveled and show no signs of rebuilding.  There are huge open fields with foundations still showing, and abandoned houses that still show the legendary marks of the triage people who checked them for damage and scrawled figures on the outside.  It's such a shame that more cannot be done to bring this city back from the catastrophe.

We moved on to the town of Breaux Bridge, near Lafayette, in the heart of Cajun country.  We kept our focus on food, but shifted the emphasis to the more Cajun and Creole pleasures of this area.  We sampled a lot of the local boudin sausages, jambalaya and gumbo.  There were cinnamon coated pecans, bread pudding, and lots of local treats.  The folks in this area are justly proud of their cuisine, and they spend a lot of time comparing different versions of their classics.  We did our best to help out.

We visited an Acadian Village nearby.  This is a small, non-profit recreation of an original Acadian community, built after the Acadian (Cajun) people were originally ejected from Canada and settled in the Louisiana area.  It is a faithful recreation of the buildings, with each of the functional areas of the community outlined and documented, and it gives a very nice picture of how these folks lived in the early days of their settlements, and of the history of their culture and its odyssey across the North American continent. 

The previous events and parades that we had seen in other cities were leading up to the actual day, but on Mardi Gras itself we were in Breaux Bridge.  We decided to do something different, and went off to a small town festival held in Iota, Louisiana, which celebrated Mardi Gras with a Cajun twist.   The celebration was quite different, small and manageable, with local folks dressed up in traditional costumes called capuchons, who arrived in a big parade and then danced and demanded quarters thrown from the audience.  There were several bands playing Cajun and Creole music, and lots of dancing in the streets.  There was little or no alcohol and the whole party was over by five in the afternoon.  We loved it. And the food was great, too.  Here's a rather crude video that we took with our little camera, but I think it will give you the flavor. 

From here, we are headed off along the Gulf Coast toward the bottom tip of Texas.  Then we will head back up the Rio Grande and across the southwest.  Home by the Fourth of July!  It's hard to believe.

Traveling the Florida Panhandle

Leaving Blue Spring State Park, we headed to another of Florida's excellent state parks, this one called Manatee Springs.  Oddly, this one didn't have nearly as many manatees as the Blue Spring one did - the count was down this year.  But we did see a few, and some very nice turtles as well as some good birds.  The biggest aggregation was the mass of turkey and black vultures that gathered in the park every night.  The trees were loaded with them at night, and it was hard to imagine what they could feed on, given the size and number of these birds.  But I guess that they forage far and wide.

We were at this park during our anniversary, which we celebrate on Valentine's Day.  For that occasion, we took a side trip to Gainesville, Florida to have dinner and see a performance of the Kingston Trio (as it is now constituted).  It was a blast from the past.  The original members of the trio are now either retired or dead, but there are some younger?! men doing the old songs with the same panache, along with jokes to appeal to the blue-haired audience.  "This is a song from 1963 - it's our most recent hit". 

While we were in Gainesville, we happened upon a exhibition at a museum on the University of Florida campus about cattle ranching in Florida, its history and traditions.  Cattle ranching, it turns out, gave rise to the term "cracker", which refers to the bullwhips used by drivers in Florida.  So there were demos of bullwhip technique, and you could try it out if you wanted (we didn't).  There were some fascinating exhibits of cattle ranch history, along with some regular exhibits at the same museum, one about fossils in Florida, and another about the huge statewide water flows today and the attempts to manage them and correct some of the past abuses. 

Another expedition from this park location was a trip down to Saint Petersburg to see the Dali Museum.  It turns out that the city houses the largest collection of works by Salvador Dali outside of Spain, and the city had just opened a new museum to house the collection in December of 2010.  We had missed that opening for various reasons, but were determined to see the museum and the collection, having viewed an earlier Dali exhibit in Atlanta.  So we made the run down to St Petersburg.

It was a lovely day, warm and sunny, and we got there early and toured the collection with the help of a well-informed and articulate docent, who guided our group around the museum.  He knew a lot about the life of Dali and the themes that were reflected in the paintings and helped us to understand the motifs and images that recur often in Dali's work, and the many stages of his artistic career.  Dali is a fascinating painter, and the collection is so extensive that we got to see how trends developed and matured in his work.

After our visit, Ivy toured a local garden complex while I had an afternoon nap.   The garden is in one of the famous Florida sinkholes, places where the limestone substrate has been eaten away and land has subsided into a huge pit.  These sinkholes are sometimes converted to parks and gardens, as they were here.

Leaving Manatee Springs, we headed off to the St George Island State Park, along the Gulf of Mexico across the Apalachicola Bay.  This is a really lovely state park that takes up one end of a long barrier island, with the rest of it taken up by rather upscale development and beach houses, lots of which are now for sale.  The beaches have some very nice shells to scrounge for, and there is good birding, particularly on the bay side where there are marshes.  There is also a bike trail that runs the length of the island to keep me busy on warm sunny days.  Our stay was rather uneventful, but filled with the kinds of activities we like best.  Ivy painted some, I went bike riding and we both hunted shells on the beach.  Weather was mostly very good, with some cooler times and fog now and then.

While we were there, we went in to the little town of Apalachicola, which is across the causeway on the other side of the bay.  We liked this town very much - it is just the sort of broken down, rather artsy beach town/fishing village that we dreamed about visiting when we started this trip.  This area of Florida, which bills itself as the Forgotten Coast, has  a great feel, not overdeveloped like so much of the state.  It also has some fabulous seafood, a lot of which is pulled out of the water right around here, and we got used to eating Gulf shrimp, a habit which we'll not be able to keep up. 

Our last stop in Florida was the St Andrews State Park, which is located right in the heart of Panama City and Panama City Beach, aka the Redneck Riviera.  It's a place with fabulous beaches and huge condo complexes, but marred by a general tackiness and devotion to T-shirt shops, tattoo parlors and gaudy miniature golf places and entertainment complexes.  The park itself was really lovely and pretty quiet, but with a weekend smattering of noisy young people.  There were some very cute deer in the park and lots of herons and egrets.  We did some shopping and some internet stuff, along with a bit of bird-watching, beach wandering and painting.  I took a couple of long bike rides along the waterfront.  And we got in a couple of movies.  The weather was sunny and nice.

From here we head off to Alabama and Louisiana for the Mardi Gras celebration.   We have been in Florida since around December 1, almost three months.  So the return trip is under way in earnest.  We even crossed a time zone boundary and are now on Central Time - one time zone closer to home.