Stay in New Orleans

Stay in New Orleans

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February 12 was Marti Gras and the recycling center was closed. I could have worked helping to clean up after parades, but decided to use the holiday to experience the tourist view of New Orleans. After showering the evening before at Riviera Spa and as the libraries were all closed, I decided to stay the night nearby. I found cars parked along the circular drive of Notre Dame Seminary and parts of it were dark. It seemed a nice quiet place and I stayed the night in front of the building to the left. This is the view at dawn when I left.
I decided to leave my car for the day and just walk around. I drove to Tulane University where there are nice quiet neighborhoods and I knew the parking and parked my car there. I took the trolley on St. Charles (I used this picture previously). However, the trolley I took made its last stop in front of Newcombe College (where I was) and picked up me and a family of about seven people. Thereafter it was completely full and became an express, passing other would be riders. However, it went only about one third of the way to the French Quarter where the parade route blocked it. It stopped at Napoleon Avenue.
So, I started walking the parade route along St. Charles Avenue. It was only about 10:30AM with the parade not due to come along this section until the afternoon, but there were already crowds of people setting up their barbecues and such. They were clearly there for a full day of partying. There were also porta-potties every block or so in the center section (normally used by trollies) but most had various padlocks or hand written signs saying private and were in roped off areas for family barbecues. One even had a sign saying $1 to use (again hand written) with a woman saying you had to pay her. As they were all from the same company, I suspect that people had all co-opted these otherwise public restrooms for their own uses. Fortunately I didn't need to use the bathroom until I got past Lee Circle. Thereafter the porta-potties were in large groups that weren't interfered with.
There were also many vendors with push carts, some as informal a shopping cart. They were selling brightly colored masks, trinkets, etc.. All in the spirit of Marti Gras. I also suspect they weren't licensed or anything, but how would you know?
As I went further along St. Charles, I crossed an avenue where an on-going parade, Zulu, was in progress. There I saw the office of Minute Men, one of the day laborer places I had considered but decided against as they looked to be in an area with more difficult parking. They also do most of the placement for parade clean up and had sent out the supplemental people for the parade I cleaned up after. They pay daily (as clearly noted on their sign), though I myself was happier with Task Force's weekly checks (less paperwork to send to my bank).
For those of you who haven't seen a Marti Gras parade, here is a 5 second video(120K, about 40 second download) of a float. It has about six people on each side who throw trinkets, mostly commonly shiny brightly coloered necklaces to the crowd. The crowd waves their arms and tries to get the attention of the people on the float so that they can catch a necklace or whatever. That always sounded strange to me, but when you get into a parade it seems natural and it is easy to get caught up in the excitement.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel.
The floats are usually built on wagons (front and rear axles with front axle steering) and pulled by a farm tractor, often leased from Kern Studios. All the tractors seem to be from the 50's or 60's as they don't have the enclosed driver area of current generation farm tractors (often with air conditioning and CD players no less). I wanted to get a picture of a tractor, but the crowd lines the parade route and the tractors aren't high up like the floats. This picture was taken through plexiglass and across an area blocked off for police administration and such. You can barely see the tractor, but it was pulling float 14, Fess, of the Zulu parade. The sign is over the engine with the driver to the left in a white shirt. The engineer in me wondered what they did with these almost antique tractors through the rest of the year. It seems to me it would make more sense to lease the tractors of nearby farmers as there is not a lot of plowing and such going on in February, but that doesn't seem to be what they do.
There was also a really big parade with 150 floats that used regular tractor trailers (like you see on the highway) with the trailer part being a flatbed (I presume) that they built the float on. Here is one coming down St. Charles in the late afternoon when the crowds had thinned somewhat. Most everyone can have a float in this parade with the Hare Krishna's being one I noticed (but didn't get my camera out in time for).
Here is a tree along the parade route. It seems to have caught more necklaces than the average parade watcher. Probably because it has more and longer limbs than the people watching the parade. It certainly wasn't doing much to attract attention to itself and didn't move around very much. Of course having cleaned up after a previous parade in Mandeville I wondered if the clean up crew would be expected to get the necklaces out of even the tallest limbs. We may never know the answer to that question, though.
As I walked along the parade route, it got really congested at one point and I crossed the street at the appropriate place (with police guidance, of course) just to get by. It turns out that is where they were filming. Here is a television video truck by the park where I had my lunch.
In this picture you can see an old style television video camera in the upper right of the picture above the bleachers as well as newer camera on a boom on the far left toward the middle (it is black and hard to see).