It was a good thing we made a second trip into the city yesterday as today we woke up to rain. Actually, we have been hearing rain on the Airstream all night. We have been pretty lucky in the bad weather column of this trip in not seeing too much rain but it has finally caught up to us.
The forecast calls for some rain in our future so we decided to take the opportunity to get back into New Orleans to do some more sightseeing before it is too late. Once again, we are taking the bridge in and forgoing the Algiers Ferry. Maybe our next visit won’t land on the perfect storm of tourists in the crescent city and we will be able to get back on that boat across the Mississippi river.
Being back in New Orleans is a pretty big milestone for us. Since leaving Florida, we don’t have many plans to stay anywhere more than a couple of days. New Orleans is the only big city we planned to spend more than a couple of days at until we got back to the west coast. Once we leave Louisiana and head into Texas, there are going to be more transit days and for longer distances.
This morning we said good-bye to our ocean front Walmart parking space in Mississippi and headed west into the state of Louisiana. Our oldest kid, Ava, was super excited to finally cross into Louisiana. There are four places that she really wanted to visit during our current road trip adventure. First was to see our friend Carrie for Halloween (check!), then it was to go to Disney World (check!), then to see mermaids at Weeki Wachee (check!) and last, but not least, was to go to New Orleans… to eat beignets!
Last night we tried to eat dinner at the buffet of Biloxi’s Boomtown casino but we were unable to get in there with the kids. Since it is just a casino and not a hotel, no one under 18 is allowed inside. We actually didn’t care that much about it. We were just trying to patronize it for allowing us to park overnight.
We made up some arbitrary rules awhile ago that in order for us to count a state as one that we have visited, we needed to tick off some boxes on a checklist that we will create. I am sure there are lots of other travelers who subject themselves to stricter requirements but the ones we decided for ourselves are pretty easy.
Last night I dug through our photos from Cedar Key and found one that showed the back of the yellow Landrover and trailer we have been seeing along our route. I remembered that they kept a blog and I was going to send them an a message through it about how we kept seeing them outside of our window.
Before our 1pm checkout today we planned to meet Sean and Kristy down at a neat little planned community called Alys Beach. We drove through it on our way in and found the place fascinating. It is a planned community like Seaside except all of the structures were designed and built by the same company. It is dubbed by the planners as ‘Luxury Beach Living from the perspective of New Urbanism’.
This morning we are taking things slow. We spent a lot of time lounging around the Mish before the girls and Luka decided to meander around the campground and park looking for creatures. The rumor has it that there are bald eagles living somewhere in the park. As I stayed back at the campsite, Marlene and the kids went out on a little adventure.
Last night when we arrived at the Cracker Barrel, we were hesitant about parking for the night. After all, we had just been kicked out of a Wal-Mart that we felt was safe and accommodating when we arrived. There were no dedicated RV parking spaces like they usually do and there were also no other RVs here. We circled for a couple of times before deciding to settle into a corner of the lot.
Our short 2-night stay at Saint Joseph Peninsula came and gone way faster than we had hoped. This is definitely a spot I can see myself spending at least a week at next time we are in the area. With still a handful of places to see in the panhandle before crossing over into Alabama, we headed back towards the mainland and kept on moving westward.
Saint Joseph Peninsula State Park is at the end of the peninsula right across the bay from the town of Port St Joe. We thought hard about whether or not we wanted to come here as we did not know what kind of phone reception and internet we might have here. We took a chance and it paid off handsomely.
