New Orleans thumbs up: Mississippi thumbs down

Greetings from New Orleans, Louisiana. We got out of Mississippi in 3 days and it wasn't soon enough. But let me go back in time a few days. Mobile, Alabama ... now that was a time. We only had 40 miles to go into Pascaguala, MS the next day so we decided to enjoy ourselves that night and sleep in a little bit. We started out the night at Haley's Club. They had $2 High-Lifes and free crawfish on Thursday night. I mean free crawfish, how can you go wrong. They were delicious, we had a few, and not to mention a couple beers, before we decided to head down the street and see what else was going on. We got about a block down Dauphine St. when we got to this bar that was advertising free ping-pong. Well, Judah was sold and we went in. We got a pitcher and posted up at the table. We downed a couple pitchers and flirted with the bartender, who was particularly friendly. After about 2 hours and a couple pitchers, I started looking around and noticed a bunch of rainbow colored objects. I found this a little wierd, but didn't think anything of it. I then noticed the clientele, and all of the people I thought were little fat boys were actually not boys at all, but rather butch lesbians. We had been there for 3 hours and little did we know we were in the gay bar. Oh yeah, and the bartender thought we were a couple, perhaps why she was so friendly. It took me a while to convince Judah of this fact but he finally came to the same conclusion. We took a couple shots, had a good laugh and headed down the street. We ended up a this bar near our hotel. I ordered 2 Bud's and they were $5 a piece. I though this was a tad steep but oh well. Ok, perhaps my favorite thing about Alabama, free refills! Yeah, so we ended up on the wrong end of 10-15 refills.

Needless to say, the ride into Pascagaula was terrible. It was 100 degrees and we were still trying to recover. On the lighter side, we did finally make it to the gulf. We jumped in that afternoon and the water was just a warm as the lake in Tuskegee. Ok, so Jimmy Buffett sings a song called Pascagaula Run, about how it was a wild and wooly town. It was Friday night and we did not find what Jimmy was talking about so instead of taking a rest day there we decided to press on the next day to Gulfport.

Gulfport; I don't have enough terrible things to say about Gulfport. I understand that you town was ravaged by a hurricane, but come on; that was 4 years ago, get your shit together. We were expecting the glitzy casinos we saw just 15 miles before in Biloxi, but to no avail. We found nothing, I mean nothing. Oh yeah and we almost got hit by cars, probably 50-60 times. I can honestly say, I HATE GULFPORT. Luckily we only had 75 miles to New Orleans.

We got out nice and early this morning. But today might have been the hardest ride yet. 80 miles into a stiff head wind in a 110 degree heat index. But enough bitching, we finally made it. We called up Jesse Daystar, brother of Rania, who is do Bike and Build across America and is in town now (we are planning on meeting up later). He recommended this hostel, which we ended up staying at (actually were I am writing this blog). This place is awesome. We got our own room for like 40 bucks and met some cool folks. Grabbed some burritos and margaritas in the Garden District and came back just in time to see the US lose to Brazil in the confederation cup. Well, I am going to sign off for now, but we are planning on spending a couple days here in New Orleans; since we haven't taken a day of since Atlanta we think we earned it.

One last thing, we crossed the 1000 mile mark today. A little pat on the back in the comments section would be apperciated.

One more last thing; I am pretty sure the entire southeast economy is based on fast food and cash-to-payday loan stores. I'm glad I can call this region home.

100 degrees, 1000 miles and counting,
Steve