Houma, Louisiana and Mardi Gras

18th Feb – 21st Feb 2022

We find ourselves in the heart of Mardi Gras country in peak Mardi Gras season. The purple, green and gold colours, baubles and banners have been increasingly festooning homes, RVs, fences, lamp posts and people as January ended and February has progressed and there is a definite building of the party–time vibe.

Christmas has barely been over a month before Mardi Gras gets going, and before that the halloween decorations are only begrudgingly taken down as Christmas trees and inflatable festive lawn ornaments are seemlessly erected. This country loves a themed party, but in this part of America it loves Mardi Gras best of all. They definitely ‘Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler’.

The town parades that characterise Mardi Gras start on mid-february weekends and build to a crescendo on Mardi Gras day itself. ‘Fat Tuesday’ fell on the 1st of March this year and seems a decidedly more fun way to celebrate the last day before the start of Lent than whipping up a few pancakes, à la Shrove Tuesday.

Most towns will have some sort of parade season and they are of various sizes, themes and levels of professionalism. A lot of the more historic parades are run by Krewes which are Mardi Gras specific members-only clubs that organise and man the floats for each parade. It can be quite ‘closed door’. Like the Masons, but with beads.

We wanted to experience Mardi Gras but had no desire to go anywhere near New Orleans to do it. We hunted for a smaller town that was vaguely on our route that had a weekend of parades where we could easily camp close to the action whilst staying safe. How hard could that be?? Actually, not very hard at all as it worked out. Houma was the place.

Houma, pronounced Homer, strapline ‘Home, Sweet Houma, is only about 35 miles from Morgan City and had exactly what we were looking for. It’s a city of about 33,000 people and still heavily steeped in its Cajun culture, the surrounding swamps and bayous isolating the area from outside influence for much of its history. The Mardi Gras celebrations here are some of the oldest and biggest outside New Orleans, with a much more family friendly, relaxed vibe. The icing on the cake was our discovery that the Houma Civic Centre, a mere 1 mile from the parade route, had RV hook-ups on its massive carpark and so we could stay within walking distance of the action. Perfect!

Our farewells to Trevor and Krista in Morgan City were made easy given the promise that they were going to come to Houma to find us for one of the parades over the weekend. We headed off and cruised to our next stop. Every town has a fairly recent hurricaine story and Houma is no different. Its is very recent, having taken a direct from huricaine Ida last August. It did not pack the punch of Katrina but in some areas many of the roofs of homes are still sporting the waterproof blue temporary fixing as the roofing companies are inundated doing the repairs. Many older, more fragile buildings did not survive and there were many piles of rumble where they once stood. Rebuilding is part of life here.

We found our allocated parking area at the civic centre centre and joined our place amongst numerous fellow RV dwelling Mardi Gras revellers. The organisation of the space allocations seemed very haphazard, bearing no relation to the lines painted on the ground and there were all shapes and sizes of rig parked in a happy jumble of angles and overlaps. Most people had a seperate vehicle and a few visitors vehicles too, giving the place definite drunken Jenga vibe. As long as no one wanted to leave in a hurry it was going to be fine. Our spot was a bit out of the fray but we had no plans to move either.

It turned out that the Civic Centre was the staging area for a lot of parade floats and was also a hub for the ubiquitous party buses. It seems that the standard operating procedure on parade days is that the members of the Krewes for that parade spend ALL DAY, from DAWN until the parade, being driven around the city in converted and decorated decomissioned school buses with the roofs cut out, DRINKING HEAVILY and having a jolly old time to the backdrop of INCREDIBLY LOUD MUSIC. Their route was repeated laps around noteable destinations of the city that featured the Civic Centre front and centre. There was no mercy for campers trying to sleep.

We arrived on Friday afternoon and there were four parades planned for the weekend: Fri and Sat evenings and two on Sun afternoon. We decided that we would go to the Friday eve one and this was our (hideously poorly calculated) plan:

The parade started at the top of town at 6pm, so we estimated that it would get to our part of town at about 7.30pm based on the time it takes to walk the distance. We had a cup of tea and a piece of king cake* at 4.30pm – very sensible pre-hydration and carbs to see us through to our street food dinner later. We set off slowly walking through a moderately tatty, semi-industrialised part of town at 5.15pm, arriving at the fairly deserted parade route by 6pm. There were only a few people around and we were surprised to secure great seats with good parade route views in an, also oddly deserted, Irish bar. We settled in for an hour or two of beers whilst waiting for the parade to arrive. A hour and a half later, nothing had happened. Still not many people had gathered. Was this to be a very poorly attended parade or had we made a naive misjudgement…?

Well it seemed the latter was true. We sat at those seats like Lord and Lady Muck for FOUR HOURS before the parade finally arrived. By that time the place was packed, many beers had been drunk (mostly by my companion), no food had been eaten and many friends had been made. Our English accents cut through the ever increasing chatter of the amassing revellers, marking us out as curious imposters that needed investigating. We met ‘Pork Chop’ (a 25 year old who was fortifying himself with the industrial quantities of vodka redbull that only a heart under the age of thirty can withstand), Gerald (a local who had driven TWO BLOCKS to the bar-I berated him for his laziness), Raymond, apparently known as ‘Brother’ to all (including his mother, apparently. Which is odd…your mother calling you Brother…isn’t it?) There was a girl who let me try on her deely boppers (look it up) and another who had badly twisted her ankle on her first evening out since having a baby 4 months ago to whom I gave up my valuable barstool. It was noisy and crowded. There was not a mask in sight. It was the first time I had felt a strangers breath on my face for nearly 2 years. Somehow it didn’t really matter.

Finally, at about 10pm, the parade arrived. Then stopped. This is normal. This is why it takes so blinking long. We headed outside to soak up the Mardi Gras Energy and score some beads. One float inched by and then I suddenly realised Nick had peaked. I bought him a burger and we weaved our way home. We had had a lot of fun, but the parade had been the least of it. We were denied a sleep-in by the next fleet of music blaring party buses that started their laps at an ungodly time on Saturday morning. Lather, rinse, repeat for the Krewes.

We opted out of Saturday. Completely.

Sunday was another day, by which time we were ready for Mardi Gras again! Perhaps we were not ready at 7am which was when the Krewes collected today’s floats that were parked up at the civic centre accompanied by more VERY LOUD MUSIC. Still no mercy for sleeping campers. There were two back to back parades today with the first one setting off at midday. Trevor and Krista collected us at about 1pm and the four of us headed back to the same area where the Irish pub was and set up camp chairs on the parade route in a small park. We spent a very pleasant three hours sitting in the sun, chatting, eating junk food and drinking the odd daiquari whilst waiting for the equally slow parade to get to us. Eventually it arrived and it was two hours of pure joy!

It is many decades since have I reaped so much dopamine from the acquisition of such piles of plastic junk. They weren’t just throwing beads, they were throwing whole bags of beads. Big beads, small beads, novelty beads. There were soft toys, hats, frisbees, hula hoops, snacks. Krista got a whole pickle in a bag. Nick got some Elton Johns. I even got a pair of boxer shorts. It was loud, it was messy, it was fun. Considering the parade had been going for up to six hours hours by the time it got to us, the Krewes on the floats were still amazingly enthusiastic and nowhere near running out of paraphanalia to lob into the crowd. I possibly can’t say the same for the members of the four or five school marching bands in the parade who were looking decidedly over it by the time they got to us. There were some pink faces and fixed smiles.

At the end of the day we had to make some serious decisions about how much of our haul to keep, what to gift to the (actual) children around us, and what to leave on the roadside (Spoiler alert : the undercrackers didn’t make the cut) The tail-end-charlie float of the parade was a ‘bead recyling’ trailer and there was a mad rush to collect up the excess bags of beads and hurl as many as one could into it. Great idea.

Trevor and Krista dropped us home and we said our goodbyes. Who knows when and where our paths may cross again in the future, but I would love to think that they will. We had had a great Mardi Gras experience and Les Bons Temps had definately Rouler’d.

*King Cake.

This purple, green and gold glitter covered confectionary is an absolute fixed feature of Mardi Gras. They are mostly massive, sold everywhere and appear to be a sort of spiced cake filled with a variety of flavours of sickly sweet goo. There is a plastic baby. The name comes from something to do with the Three Kings and the baby is to signify baby Jesus, I think. Historically the baby was hidden inside the cake and whoever got the baby in their slice was meant to have good luck. In litigation-rife USA the baby is now placed atop the cake and looks disturbingly like it is drowning in a sea of glittery icing. We managed to find a smaller version that was heavier than a neutrino star. We only managed to eat half the cake. The baby is displayed on our pinboard of treasures, for good luck.