Saturday, February 25, 2017

Walked in the St. Louis Mardi Gras Parade

Two month's ago I got an email blast from Randall's, a well known local liquor store chain, asking for volunteers to walk with their float in the St. Louis Mardi Gras Parade. Yes please! I signed us both up.


I imagined it would go something like this.


Per the website: "The Bud Light Grand Parade is the Midwest’s largest and most spectacular pre-Lenten celebration. The parade begins just south of Busch Stadium and winds through the streets of Downtown South and Soulard to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. Krewes from over 100 floats will toss over 10,000,000 strands of beads and other sought-after goodies to celebratory masses gathered along the route." 

I've heard that our Mardi Gras is second in the country only to New Orleans, which I sort of believe since we're so Frenchy but who knows.

The assembly point was in a big parking lot by Busch Stadium. Not only did we have a fun free thing to do but we could walk there from our apartment. How exciting.


As soon as we showed up they made us sign waivers. You know you're about to have fun when there's waivers.










We got there a bit early so we had plenty of time to scope out the other floats.






Hurricanes were provided by our float so we pre-gamed a little.




Inside the train's caboose.


The people in charge of the float weren't super welcoming and we were a little iffy about whether we should stay but once the parade got started it was best thing ever. One of the other float workers described it as being famous for an hour.












The police were very professional and would not accept my bead bribes.


I don't know who this is.


After the excitement was over we retired to Duke's for some relaxation.




We saw our pals Wing and Joel in the crowd and whipped some beads at them.




Someone erred and let me within arm's distance of free fedoras at some point.


We walked like 10 miles today.






A Merry Mardi Gras to us all and God bless us every one.

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