Living the Dream with Joyce

Saturday, February 2: Mardi Gras! Although Mardi Gras goes for almost two weeks, this is the one day I chose to go - mainly because there were two parades today, and Ron and Dora set their RV up on Seawall Blvd. and put on two fabulous bbqs! They took the RV and parked it on Thursday, in order to save their space for Saturday. Their daughter stayed in it until Saturday, when the action began. A lot of the park residents came, some in their own vehicles (holy parking issues!) and most in the van, which took a number of trips to transport them. Never having been to a Mardi Gras anywhere, I was fascinated by everything. Apparently, Galveston hosts the third largest Mardi Gras in the States, right behind San Diego and, of course, New Orleans. Ron and Dora had a huge bbq set up on a flat trailer behind their RV, and they served chicken, ribs, hamburgers, sausages, hot dogs - as well as Dora's famous Gumbo and various veggie & bean dishes and brownies and cakes for dessert - all at their own expense! The afternoon parade was great fun - I wasn't used to the practice of throwing beads from the floats - so I collected quite a number and variety. The parade lasted for a little over an hour, with everything from marching bands to pirates to fire engines. Afterwards, Rob, his mother, another woman whose name I've forgotten, and I went for a walk along the seawall - took a few pictures.
The evening parade was a bit wilder - there was a "party bus" parked across the street from us, complete with DJ and loud music. At one point, people just started spontaneously line dancing - and of course the idea spread until that whole area of the street was full of dancing people. Some of our crowd joined in, too. There was one little guy (maybe 10 years old)| who danced up such an impressive storm that the entire crowd stopped dancing in order to watch him and take videos! I'm sure that he will turn up on Youtube some day soon. I included a couple of videos, but don't know if they'll remain videos for you to see.
By 8:30, us older folks were running out of steam - and Ron and Dora had to get their RV off the blvd. that night, so we all went home, leaving the streets to the more inebriated.