Bourbon faced on sh*t street

We woke up pretty early in our Panama City Beach motel so that we could get on the road. We took the advice of the waiter from the night before and turned onto the 30A Highway which ran along the Gulf of Mexico for a short while to find a place for breakfast. We came across a settlement that looked pretty wealthy with big fancy houses. We found a place for breakfast which looks liked the local bar at night, but at least they served eggs for breakfast which we hadn't had much on this trip. Unfortunately the food wasn't as good as we had hoped, and Sam's bread that was served with breakfast was mouldy. He did complain, but one of the only times that we haven't found the service up to scratch, the waitress didn't really do much to rectify the mouldy bread situation, she didn't even offer to get him some more.

So after the rather grim breakfast, and a little walk along the white sandy beach, we carried on. After consulting the guidebooks we were informed that the town that we had passed through was purpose built and was the set for the movie, The Truman Show. It was from looking at the maps that we realised that we would be in four states that day, Florida, where we had stayed, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisana, our destination. We knew that we would be reentering Mississippi when we followed the Mississippi river up to Memphis, so we decided we needed to stop in Alabama for lunch. We got off the highway into a small town called Grand Bay just before the Mississippi state border, and came across a place called Nana's Country Kitchen. It looked very small and authentic from the road, sort of like a tea rooms, and there were tables outside. We had a surprise when we opened the door, because there was just a counter and kitchen, no tables and upon asking, we were informed, no bathrooms. It had looked larger from the outside. We placed our orders which consisted largely of fried chicken, which is the speciality of the south, and walked to Walgreens where we were told we could find public toilets. I don't think the toilets were public as such, probably for Walgreens customers, but as we'd been directed there we assumed that they were probably used to non-customers walking in to use the restrooms.

We returned to Nana's to wait for our lunch, and we read the story of the start of the business, how the two lady owners wanted to bring healthy, hearty, southern country cooking to the area. It amazed us that food like fried chicken tenders, fried chicken burgers and fries could be considered healthy options for a family, but this is how it is in the south. We ate our food and got back on the road, we were all excited about getting into New Orleans. We made good time on the trip to New Orleans, but unfortunately we encountered traffic in the centre of the city where we were staying so travelled about 2 miles in 45 minutes.

After checking into the hotel, I was looking at the window at the view and we were reminded to pull our curtains when getting naked, as a woman across the road in another hotel was obviously getting ready to go out, preparing her hair and make up butt-naked in full view of the open curtains.

Bourbon street is the famous party street in New Orleans and we were keen to check it out, so we got dressed for dancing and headed that way, which was only about 5 minutes from our accommodation. Along the route of the entire trip Fraser has always been keen to see if there are any restaurants where the guy from the American show, Man vs Food has been, but New Orleans is the only place so far that we have actually been to one of the restaurants where the guy went, apparently he ate 150 oysters. Normally a restaurant would give you bread to start on the table, this place gave us small red skinned potatoes. At first we thought that it was pretty weird, but if you ask any of us at the end of this trip what the most memorable foods were, these potatoes would rank pretty high. They were new potatoes, but lightly spicy and salted, absolutely delicious!

All of our dinners were lovely, but Fraser's is most note worthy, as he had ordered the half platter of seafood. The pile of food that came out was astonishingly large, and all one colour, as even though there was four different types of seafood on the plate, they had all been battered and deep fried. Needless to say that Fraser could not eat it all and he asked it to be packed up to take away and potentially give away to a homeless person, even though we hadn't actually seen any in our short few hours in New Orleans.

So with dinner done we excitedly walked the few more blocks (enroute Fraser ditched his leftovers, as we didn't come across any homeless people) to Bourbon Street and the scene that greeted us was madness, a complete assault of the senses. Firstly we could hear music from the clubs competing with each other, some live music and some djs. The street is closed off to traffic, so the multitudes of people are just walking down the street, and the big neon lights on the front of every club are flashing and blinking. We walked up the street a bit, taking it all in, before finding a place for a drink. On this short walk, Fraser was sleezed over by one woman trying to get him to go into the nearest bar, we saw strippers standing in the doorways of the strip bars 'enticing' people in and tried to avoid the drunk and debausorous people around us.

We chose a bar with a band playing live music and bought some drinks, red bull and vodkas, and the drinks were so strong, we realised that they had split one can of red bull between three glasses and the rest was topped up with ice and vodka. The band playing was great, but we weren't quite ready to hit the dancefloor. We moved on to walk further down the street and some beads were thrown down to us by a girl on the balcony above, I thought this was great, just wave to them and they threw them down. It wasn't until we continued walking down that we realised women on the street were lifting their shirts to flash their boobs and the men on the balconies would throw down strings of beads to them. Amy and I were quite pleased that we managed to get some beads without having to show our boobs. The strings of beads littered the street, some broken, but so many women walking down the street had loads around their necks. It seems this practice originates from the Mardi Gras culture and has grown into being infamously accepted on this street, you can even buy merchandise that says 'Boobs for Beads'.

It's the boob flashing and the huge number of titty bars on this street that give it the reputation of being a meat market. We spent a bit of time on the balcony of one bar watching the interesting scenes below, and then after a few more places where we danced to all sorts of music, we rolled into our hotel room at about 1am. Bourbon Street was definitely an interesting experience, but we all agreed we couldn't have done it again the following night.