September 27, 2000

MARDI GRAS 2000!

Alright. You wanted it? You got it.

3/3/2000

I went home on a lazy Friday. It was a 7-hour drive from Dallas to Hattiesburg. Rather than driving straight to New Orleans (I-20,I-49,I-10) and meeting my friends from the Burg there, I went the other way around to Hattiesburg (I-20,US49) so I could visit some family while I was on the other side of the Mississippi River. Tomorrow, my friends and I will make the annual journey to the great Mardi Gras.

3/4/2000

It started out as a cool Spring morning in southern Mississippi. At about 11am, I went across town over to Pete's house where he and Brian where waiting. I took their bags and put them on the left side of the back seat. Pete and Brian then came out with a cooler and an all-plastic Radio Flyer wagon. My confusion was soon remedied with Pete-logic.

The idea is this: The gospel according to Pete: You don't want to carry your cooler al the way from the Jackson Brewery to Canal Street. So, you put your alcohol inside the cooler, the cooler inside the wagon(and the cooler looked like it was MADE just for this), then pull the wagon to wherever the parade is.

After this merging of sacred artifacts, this Wagon-Cooler combo has many superpowers:

1. The aforementioned transportation of alcohol (and lesser things such as food)
2. Up to five people can stand on this contraption and catch beads (a boost of 2 feet which does make a difference)
3. Transportation of drunken friends from parade back to the car
4. A beverage holder
5. A bench
6. Sheer novelty

So, we load up the cooler and the broken down wagon into the trunk and it just barely fits (Thank you Toyota!). We load into the Camry, then take off down I-59 to Slidell. Just over an hour later, we arrive in Slidell where we stop at one of the liquor stores that Pete and Brian used to frequent during their younger years (both of them are originally from the Slidell/New Orleans area). We aquire Budweiser, Seagrams 7, Sprite, and a few of bags of ice.

After accomplishing the supply mission, we continue on to the mecca of voodoo and tourism which lies just across Lake Pontchartrain on I-10. Taking the Elysian Fields exit off of I-10, traffic looks normal. But, we knew this wouldn't last long the closer we got to the river/downtown. After about an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic wherein we only moved maybe two miles we finally made it to the Jackson Brewery parking lot, and there was still room! So, we tooled in, parked, unloaded our gear, assembled the Radio Flyer (well, ok, it took less than 20 seconds), and threw the cooler into the wagon. We all started on our first drinks and took off toward Canal street to see Endymion.

Saturday Night's Endymion

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