Day 2

We have a week together with Mom & Dad! They arrived this afternoon, about 24 hours after us. The last time they met us out in the world (Eastern Washington in summer 2023), they were traveling in their truck camper, but this time they kept it simpler by just driving down from Chicago in their Tesla Model 3 (proving that long-distance trips with an electric vehicle are possible!) That meant we could leverage their wheels to explore a wider area than we normally would during a city-stay, though our central Mobile location also encouraged plenty of exploration on foot, an excellent way to get to know this city none of us had ever been to before.

Day 3

We took advantage of our location to walk to and from the first parade of Mobile’s Mardi Gras season. Mobile has some of the most-treacherous decaying sidewalks we’ve ever navigated, but combined with just walking in the street, our semi-random route brought us to unexpected discoveries beyond the stately historic houses.

In this increasingly-homogenized country, it was delightful to discover how much Mardi Gras season is treated as a true holiday here, a cultural unifier completely unique to this small region. Store clerks (or even random people on the street) say “Happy Mardi Gras!” to you just as they say “Merry Christmas!” everywhere else in the country. And houses are decorated in the purple, gold and green of Mardi Gras to a similar frequency and amplitude as Christmas decorations in most places (even including lights and inflatables, in addition to masks, beads, banners, etc.) “There are holidays celebrated in pockets of the United States that are completely unknown to the rest of the country” is a statement I wouldn’t have really believed without seeing it here for myself.

We got early-dinner at Callaghan’s Irish Pub, eating comfortably outdoors at neighborhood corner spot surrounded by residential houses. A few more blocks brought us to the parade route, where locals had parked their vehicles up on the grass, rear-ends facing the roadway, sort of as a tailgating setup (including some pumping pre-parade music). We found a spot on the other side of the street, where a cautiously-friendly just-returned-from-medical-leave police officer did his best to educate these out-of-towners about the parade, Mardi Gras, and broader Mobile during the hour-plus while we waited for the parade to reach us.

Unlike all city parades I’ve ever attended, in which an assortment of individual organizations are linked together to comprise the parade, a Mardi Gras parade is the parade of a single organization/club/”krewe” (though they will include school marching bands or other groups between their floats). The Conde Cavaliers open the season, and by the time they reached us, the entire route was filled with spectators, but with no problem for anyone to get right up on the fence if they wanted to. I didn’t do a survey, but it felt like we were the only tourists, and the racial makeup reflected the 50% black/40% white composition of Mobile itself (much better than the 100% white clientele at Callaghan’s, or the 100% white membership of Conde Cavaliers parading in front of us).

The custom-designed and lighted floats are the main visual attraction of the parade, but it quickly became clear that the “throws” are the main source of excitement for much of the audience. Which surprisingly included myself, despite having nowhere to keep any of the cheap items being lobbed toward us from the guys lining the floats. And even more-surprisingly it included my mom, who I generally consider to be extremely low down on the “materialist” spectrum! But there we all were, arms outstretched, reaching, jumping, and grabbing at whatever we could catch. Apparently there is just something infectious about the game, and it was at least good to feel like we fit right in.

Our police officer friend grabbed us an empty bag thrown off a float so that we could carry our unexpected haul back home with us. Despite the huge volume of merchandise thrown from the floats (the main Mobile parade website says the Cavaliers “always like to throw”, perhaps moreso than other parades), very little survived on the ground before someone scrambled to pick it up. But there was still plenty of debris to be cleared by a high-pressure hose truck immediately following the parade, which also helped chase the crowd out to reopen the streets, only to repeat it all tomorrow.

Our AirBNB already had a big cookie jar full of Moon Pies, so we knew they were a Mardi Gras thing, but the Cavaliers didn’t just throw individual Moon Pies, they threw entire boxes! And Little Debbie boxes as well! We also got Rice Krispie Treats, chips, candy, and even a bag of ramen! Beyond those “practical” items, we ended up with: a frisbee, a t-shirt, a light-up sword, a squishy corncob, several plastic cups, a couple stuffed animals, a rubber duckie, and a yellow garter. And of course around 30 strings of beads, no nudity required!

There are probably a dozen cities and towns along the Gulf Coast that host Mardi Gras parades, but Mobile might have been the best place for our virgin experience: big enough (2nd only to New Orleans) to have a multi-week schedule of parades, and thus quality floats with tons of throws and a deep century-old culture around it all, but small enough to feel like we had just stumbled into a local tradition.

When we decided to travel full-time, one of our stated motivations was so that we could stay in a town an extra day if we learned that their “Tadpole Racing Festival” or whatever was the next day (something our time-limited schedules never allowed pre-retirement). We’ve almost never actually ended up doing that, but in Mobile we came close. Augmented by sharing it with Mom & Dad!