On the Road Again - Mardi Gras

Well, after a year off, we're on the road again. New Orleans is something any time of year, but Mardi Gras is the Big Thing. It lasts several weeks, and every day or two there are one or more parades, each one put on by a Krewe. This is the Krewe of Iris. Neat mask...people work all year getting up costumes like this; sometimes they are re-used, buy yhe theme for th parqade is different every year.

Streetcar

Wagon with a jazz band in the back. A lot of them just use a big boom-box.

Country-music Theme...

Hawaii -

Alaska? Long way from here...

Something to do with Atlantic City, NJ:

Las Vegas:

Also, drill teams...

Bands...

They even send in the Marines.

...And the bagpipers

The Krewe of Zulu was started around 1900, when the Blacks asked if they could join in. Wellll, yesss, but it still had to be segregated. Only blacks allowed (at first. Then, whites could be in the Krewe, but they had to wear blackface). Later, the occasional black was allowed to be in a white Krewe if he wore Whiteface, unless of course he represented a black character. Then, the black had to wear blackface (hope I got all that down right). Now, by law, anybody can be in any Krewe, but sometimes old customs die hard.

Anyway, Zulu does things a bit differently. Themes are African:

There are a lot of Queens of various organizations:

A Pirate:

Tiger:

A King:

Krewe of Rex, the biggest single parade:

Don't really know what the Buzzards have to do with it:

"Persephone, Goddess of Spring" (Well, sort of):

"Rex Transit Gloria Mundi"

From many of the floats, they throw Stuff (Reaslly, really cheap plastic necklaces, and maybe other stuff; the Zulus somethimes throw carved coconuts...

Which the spectators await...

You can get thigns thrown to you if you wave:

It's supposed to help if you're beautiful, or wearing an exotic costume.

People collect a lot of this stuff:

But sometimes they're too lazy, or fastidious, to pick it up off the ground:

The town of Metairie, north of NO, has its parades at night:

Krewe of Zeus:

Well, after a year off,

On the Road

All these travels took us to interesting places, but the travel itself was fascinating too.

This ws our rig - bikes on the back, an inflatable boat on top (which turned out to be a lot of trouble; we only used it once).
There are places where the road can go a long way without a road, a house (or sometimes even another car) in sight.

Cotton bales in North Carolina
Oil wells in Oklahoma. A lot of them aren't running, some are.

A picnic table that looks like an oil well

A picnic table that looks like a teepee.

The strange water-bringing dragon...

Lots of irrigation

Wind Generators
Open range means there may be critter wandering around the road. Fortunately, you can see them a long way away. There is a view, by the way, that real Westerners never say 'cow', since it's often a steer. The singular of cattle is 'critter'.
Some places have seen better days.
Then it comes time to stop for the night:

We stayed a lot in National or State ParksThe truck/van was basically a bed with a lot of storage underneath and beside it. Cooking meals involved a lot of unpacking stuff, and repacking it afterwards. ...and a lot in commerecial campgrounds
...which was really fun when it was raining.Every so often we got mail, and then there was a day of paying bills. Ugh.
There are a lot of people doing the trailer thing; note this is on blocks. Some people stay all summer in one place.

Then there are the toy people:

A Mercedes in a trailer??The cyclists go a lot of miles per day, but don't have to carry their tents, food etc.
I suppose this guy may be a trucker?

A Dune Buggy - used to be a big thing (at one time, when VW bugs were the rage, a Bug was more likely to be stolen than a Chevy Corvette). The antenna is for visibility, not communication.

This campground owner had several really beautiful classic cars, and one classic trailer.

Keeping track of where you've been...
Wanted to ask about this, but didn't...
This caboose was part of the campground:

A large portion of the trailer people had dogs. So free dogs biscuits were a thing.
I don't suppose this was actually a very large pooper-scooper, or was it?
Some of the bathrooms were interesting.


The primitive campgrounds did have different kinds of outhouses. Most of them didn't bother apologizing. A number of them used some kind of waterless sewage digestion system - makes a lot of sense out where water is a rare and precious thing.

Space-age restroom
Gets to the essence of why people want to stuff things they've killed, I think...
Why not dress up things like propane tanks - do cows give honey?We have 'Adopt - a highway' deals back East; here. they seem to do a lot more of it. Not always organizations. Mostly, they do a very good job of keeping the highways clear; wish we did better on the Right Coast.
Practically everywhere, even where it's flat, you can see a mountain range in the distance.

The caretaker at this National Park campground had his own solar array. It was enough to power his floodlights at night. He did have to move it around to face the sun, every hour or so.

Toward the Oregon coast, these signs were everywhere.
A number of places got up batches of fiberglass animals, and the locals painted them .
Seattle was full of pigs - we maust have seen 20 or so...


At the Tillamooks [Washington] Creamery

Washington, NC - a crab:
This was in St John, US Virgin Islands (another trip):
And, Two-Buck Chuck wine - actually, not at all bad.
Indian pottery - they said this was actually stuff they dug up. Surprisingly appropriate for modern coffee-drinking.