Down in New Orleans
Where the blues was born
It takes a cool cat to blow a horn
On LaSalle and Rampart Street
The combo's there with a mambo beat
The Mardi Gras mambo, mambo, mambo
Party Gras mambo, mambo, mambo
Mardi Gras mambo, ooh
Down in New Orleans
I have been missing from the DIS for a few days because we spent last weekend in New Orleans at some Mardi Gras parades and then I worked Monday & Fat Tuesday. I'll probably post a trip update later this week, but in the meantime, I thought I would share a little recap of our very fun and exciting weekend!
Friday night started off exciting all right, but for all the wrong reasons. We left the house at 6:45 pm taking our usual route to I-10 to drive to my parents house for the night, not remembering that it was also the parade route that night! It didn't take us long to figure it out, turn around, and go another way. But then halfway to my mom's we came to a dead stop in Baton Rouge because the interstate was completely shut down. We sat there for an hour! Paxton was already awake way past his bedtime, so at 9:30 pm when we finally started moving he looked at me and said, "I'm sleepy." So of course he fell asleep for 45 minutes as we finished driving to my parents house and was awake when we got there at 10:15 pm and wouldn't go to sleep in the pack & play. So for the first time in his 2 years of life he slept in the bed with us. Suffice to say, I have NO IDEA how people sleep with toddlers because it was the worst night of sleep ever! I got smacked in the face by a Paxton hand more times than I care to remember. lol
But after that terrible night, the rest of the weekend was much better. We were up at 7:10 am Saturday because of the sunlight coming in the windows that woke Paxton up, so we started getting ready. We had some breakfast and got dressed to be out the door a little after 9 am. We were driving into the city to meet up with my Uncle David and his family.
A few days before, I had been talking with him about something else and he asked if we were coming in for parades. Turns out, a huge group of people from where he lives rent out the parking lot next to the Hotel Intercontinental on St. Charles Ave, right on the parade route. For $50 ($25 each for me and DH), we were fed all day, got use of the grandstands set up there, and got a wristband for access to the hotel to use the restroom (totally worth the money alone for bathroom access!!). We parked our car a street over from the parade route for only another $20 for the whole day (other places were charging $40!) and knew we were at Mardi Gras for real when we saw this sign on the way out.
After meeting up with my uncle and his oldest daughter Skylar (his 2 little ones were still asleep upstairs) at his hotel, we walked over to the parking lot to check it out and get a spot. Certain people in their group were designated to go out early in the morning each day and set up everyone's ladders, so those were already lined up in front of the grandstand. We claimed our spot on the first level of the grandstand behind their ladder so that our kids could be around each other during the parade and Paxton could maybe sit in their ladder with his kids since we don't have one (our project for this year though is to have one constructed for him by Mardi Gras season next year!). If you have no clue what I mean about these ladders, you'll see in the pictures.
We had some time to kill before the first parade, and they were already cooking up burgers for lunch when we got there at 10:30 am so we got one to share a little closer to 11. We hoped Paxton would eat some, but he was only interested in eating every kind of chip they had by the handful or running around on the grandstands with Skylar. Luckily, they broke out a loaf of bread and some peanut butter & jelly later on in the day so he did end up eating most of a pb&j sandwich at some point in addition to all of his snacking!
Eventually Jessica came down with the two little kids from their hotel room and my parents and sister joined us too to wait for the parade to start.
Nonni & Poppi
Me, my sister & my mom!
A cute picture DH took of me and my cousin/godchild Stryder!
A great photo my dad got of Paxton and DH
Finally, it was time for the first parade of the day, the Krewe of Iris! It's an all female krewe, and their floats are really fantastic! David & Jessica's two kids and one of their friends were sitting in their ladder, but Jessica's cousin's ladder was right next to that one and they had not arrived yet, so she told us we were more than welcome to let Paxton sit in it for the parade. He loved it! It gave us some ideas for the one we will be building for him, because they had installed cup holders in it too! lol
Love this one! He was so excited!
Uncle David's girls ready for Iris!
The parade started rolling, and I don't think Paxton even noticed that they were throwing beads, he was just so excited to see the floats! He clapped and cheered for them more than anything else.
See? Oh, and check out the basketball hoop with the photo of Roger Goodell on it...that led to the people around us being BOMBED with huge bags of beads as people on the floats tried to hit it!
Paxton loved the parade, but by the time it ended, it was waaaaay past his nap time. My sister also had to be to work for 5, so around 3 my parents and sister left taking Paxton with them. We had been hoping to see both daytime parades before they had to go, but with the timing it just didn't work out. They said Paxton crashed out in the car immediately!
The next parade we caught was the Krewe of Tucks. It's a group that started out as Loyola students trying to start their own krewe and has grown since then into a full fledged krewe with a really goofy theme. A lot of it is sexual innuendos, but it is all very funny and goes over the little ones' heads (I hope!). They are most known for throwing rolls of toilet paper! It was my first time seeing this parade, and it was a lot of fun but we didn't really take pictures.
Once that one was over, we had a pretty long wait for the nighttime parade, Endymion. They served dinner (jambalaya) and we continued to snack on popcorn and king cake while we held our spot.
DH and I waiting for the parade! You can barely see my Carnival Time shirt (it's a clock that looks like a king cake) because it was so chilly I wore a jacket all day!
The crowds really come out in droves for Endymion!
Captain's float
Kelly Clarkson!
You can really see how the entire atmosphere changes at night! During the day it was very family oriented. But while I was sitting there waiting for Endymion, the girls I saw walking around were just wearing less and less until I actually saw one girl completely topless with only a painted on design covering her chest! Not even any pasties! And for about 20 minutes the parade came to a stop and there was a guy on the float encouraging every woman he made eye contact with to lift her shirt, and a couple of them did.
A really funny moment happened here too while the parade was stopped. All day there was a DJ in the grandstands playing music that went along with each float (for example, one was coming with a lion on the front, so he started playing
The Lion Sleeps Tonight, etc.). While it was stopped, he just started playing crowd favorites like
Don't Stop Believin' and
Sweet Caroline to keep us entertained. So then he starts playing a rap song (we later found out it's called
All I Do is Win by DJ Khaled) and everyone got so excited and started doing the hand motions that go along with it, and DH and I were just looking at each other and we both said, "I have NEVER heard this song before!" Even the people a LOT older than us seemed to know it! I couldn't stop laughing, especially when DH said, "I guess all we listen to is podcasts and Disney music!"
Anyway, Endymion ended around 9:15 pm and we hurried out to beat the crowds. We managed to get out and didn't encounter too many other people at the parking garage waiting to pay (no one was urinating in the lobby either, BTW lmao!). We seemed to beat the crowds out and I snapped this picture of the Superdome lit up for the Endymion Extravaganza going on in it.
We got back to my mom's after 10 and took some quick showers before tiptoeing into the guest bedroom so we wouldn't wake Paxton up. We definitely couldn't handle another night sleeping with him! He got us up around 7:45 the next morning, and we had some breakfast and were taking our time getting ready. Until they made an announcement on the news that they were pushing the parades up by 30 minutes because there was a lot of rain forecasted for the afternoon! Then suddenly we were rushing around. But we made it in plenty of time and only had to walk about a half mile from where we parked to the beginning of the parade route. So we got to see all the floats lined up and ready to roll.
From that spot, we saw the Krewe of Okeanos and the Krewe of Mid City. Paxton was eating everything in sight! See him eating that snack bag full of Cheerios in the picture? He ate ALL of them, even after eating a muffin for breakfast, then we caught mini bags of Zapp's chips that they were throwing in Mid City and he polished off one of those by himself.
He also got very excited when he caught not one but two swords (or as he calls them, pirate hook swords!).
Then at the very end, he caught this stuffed clock and a dinosaur hat.
After Mid City, we started walking down Magazine St. in search of some food before the last daytime parade, the Krewe of Thoth, started. We found a little pizza by the slice place that was open, so we each got a slice and I got to use their bathroom (yay!). We sat down on the sidewalk to eat and we were having a hard time trying to eat our own pizza and feed Paxton his. So DH took DS to see some of the riders on horses so I could eat my slice and when they came back, could feed Paxton his so DH could eat too.
DH has been collecting doubloons with his dad his entire life, and he still likes to catch them for his dad when we go to parades even though he doesn't have his own collection. You might have noticed the sign I made him on my Cricut from the first parades. But anyway, the point of me saying this is that when he took Paxton to see all of the riders on horses, Paxton wasn't so much interested in the horses, he just kept asking all of the riders for doubloons!! DH was very excited to get so many doubloons so easily because of course they were readily giving them to Paxton.
After eating, we found a spot for Thoth that happened to be in a gravel parking lot, so Paxton spent more time picking up rocks than he did trying to catch anything.
I thought he would be full from all of his snacking and a big piece of pizza, but when my FIL caught a moonpie, he sure ate that too!
He did enjoy getting up on DH's shoulders for some of the floats though.
As we were leaving, we gave all of our beads away to a guy next to us who was collecting them for his daughter who was riding in a parade Mardi Gras day and just took home the stuffed animals and toys we had caught for him. He has about 50 plush and foam footballs from all the parades he has been to in his 2 years of life!
We left the parade route at 3 pm and headed home. Paxton napped for about an hour in the car, which was great, and we got home without incident around dinnertime.
All in all, it was a GREAT weekend! Doing it the way we did Saturday with the food and bathroom access was much more my speed, but DH didn't like being so far away from the barricade because it was harder to catch anything. Plus, it was so much fun hanging out with my awesome family! Sunday was more DH's way of doing parades, but I still had fun. It was a nice way to do Mardi Gras since I was working Tuesday (and the weather was a lot nastier too!)
I know this ended up being kind of longer than I had planned, but I hope you all enjoyed that little taste of Mardi Gras! I'll have a trip update posted soon.
We tried on one of our AK days and got there about 30 min early and we didnt get into the show. We didnt want to stay in line and wait for the next one, so we just went on with our afternoon. Really want to see it though. Maybe we can run over to AK in Oct and try.
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Based on your photos, though, it looks really good. Lots of CM and character interaction...
I LOVE that place, I could live there! But that's what's so great about Disney, there's something for everyone!
confused3) but I'm sure your parents had a blast and enjoyed WWoHP.
