I Went to NOLA For Mardi Gras: Here’s What Went Down

If you did not get to experience Mardi Gras in New Orleans this year, I am here to let you live through mine! It all started that Friday, when 15 of us drove five and a half hours from Tallahassee to New Orleans. We took three separate cars and packed five people in every car. Trying to fit all of our stuff in my trunk was like playing the most difficult game of Tetris. After we packed my trunk and I picked up the rest of the gang, the car ride began. As you can imagine, the car ride playlist consisted of a range of throwbacks from Usher to Avril Lavigne. Five and a half hours later we finally arrived!

When we first arrived in New Orleans, I noticed that our Airbnb was only four miles off the highway, we were so close! Or at least that’s what I thought. The traffic was insane when we got there that those last four miles took me another half hour of driving. After the longest half hour of my life, we had finally made it, but then came the next 30 minutes of us trying to find parking. If you have never been to an Airbnb in New Orleans, you should know that most of the parking is street parking. It was all first come first serve and we were definitely not first! We had to park a couple blocks down and walk our stuff over, but it was free parking and I was able to safely leave my car there for the entire weekend. 

We walk up the little steps of our home for the weekend and found our friends from the other two cars inside. It was time for us to get ready, get dinner and go drink. That first night half of us found a food truck with genuine Cajun food, while the other half somehow managed to get reservations at another restaurant. I was in the group with the food truck and wow do I miss that food! We had Cajun seafood loaded fries and my mouth is watering just writing about it. 

Now let’s get to the part of Mardi Gras in New Orleans that I am sure many of you are here to read about, Bourbon Street. Bourbon Street is probably exactly what you are thinking of. It is filled with people walking with drinks in their hands and beads around their necks. I couldn’t even tell you the amount of times I got hit in the face with beads from people tossing them off the balconies. Nonetheless, we got into our first bar and got our drinks. We started light with just a couple of mixed drinks, nothing crazy. A few hours pass and we decided it was time we find the famous grenade drink. The amount of sugar in that drink was insane, but yes, I still drank the entire thing. No sense in wasting money on it! From there we found our next bar, the bar with the mechanical bull in it. If you have a bold friend, then you know they just have to ride the bull. To my friend that rode the bull that night and broke all of her beads doing it, I am forever proud of you! The only very negative part of this night was when our friend had her phone stolen out of her bag. This was obviously a reoccurring event during New Orleans because we met dozens of people saying they had their phone stolen as well. The rest of that night included a couple of shark attack drinks, an attempt to order a pizza but failing because the place closed and finally heading home to go to bed.

We finally made it to Saturday, or day two in New Orleans. We woke up and went to brunch at The Ruby Slipper Café. We all needed a good meal after that night on Bourbon Street. The rest of the day consisted of some of us going to popular spots around the French Quarters. We went into all the cheesy gift stores and beautiful antique stores. We also went to the ever so famous Café Du Monde and just casually sat next to James Franco. It was so weird that at first, it did not even register with me who he was. No one was bothering him for pictures or anything he was just chilling with some friends and drinking a coffee. We went home from there, put our wigs on and headed back out. We got an amazing dinner that night at the famous Oceana Grill. The jambalaya pasta was a ten out of ten, I would highly recommend. We attempted to get back on Bourbon Street that night, but it was so busy you could barely walk along the street. The second phone was stolen just walking down Bourbon, and we decided that it was just not worth it at that point. We walked home going into more shops and stopping for Gelato and then just had a little party back at our weekend home. 

Sunday it was time to play Tetris in my trunk again and head back to Tallahassee! We got a nice, hearty meal at McDonalds that morning and took the trip back. The moral of the story when going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans is to have an amazing time, get some drinks and hold tightly onto your things! 

All photos are courtesy of Renee Bram.

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