Stuck in New Orleans
Louisiana, U.S.A. – Thursday, June 8th, 2023
I think you’re always prepared for the hangover the next morning, even if it doesn’t take the form of a literal hangover. I’m too neurotic to ever get close to that point, especially in the middle of a packed itinerary with a relatively early next morning; but as I was walking to our car, I felt the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had gotten a little too carefree in the Big Easy several moments before I saw the shattered glass on the ground. Our car had been broken into (along with every other car parked outdoors overnight, including the newlyweds next to us), exactly as we had been warned.
Fortunately nothing was stolen. “They’re usually looking for guns left in the console or glovebox,” we were informed upon filing the police report. In a way this pissed me off even more, not just for the pointlessness of it all, but for being implicitly identified with the most asinine redneck idiocy that nevertheless must happen often enough to make it an attractive target. Could the thieves not do some profiling based on our blue state license plate and choice erudite bumper stickers? Regardless, there was nothing more for the police to do other than get it on record for any insurance claims that might need to be made. Next was to find a mobile glass replacement service so we could get back on the road ASAP and salvage as much of the trip as possible. It took a few calls but eventually we found a service who thought they could get to us sometime today, although a precise ETA could not be given.
With a surprise extra day in New Orleans, we could have toured some more, but frankly neither of us was in the mood for it. The most we could muster was to find a decent breakfast spot nearby, then decamp back to the hotel lobby for some needed downtime (mostly on our digital devices) that I’m usually loath to plan into an itinerary yet often forces itself in at some point one way or another.1
We weren’t back on the road until 5:00pm. Far from ideal, as there wasn’t much of this day’s original itinerary that could be salvaged, but admittedly it also could have been much worse, as we at least would avoid a cascading impact to subsequent days in the schedule had it required another overnight in New Orleans. I’ll compare the original plan to what we ended up with. Heading east along the Gulf Coast, it would have started with an up close drive-by of the abandoned Jazzland site; instead I had to make do with a single photograph of the lonely (and since-demolished) Mega Zeph structure from the highway.
Biloxi
Mississippi, U.S.A.
My main goal for the day was to experience just enough in Mississippi that I could comfortably check it off my list of 50 states visited. Originally I had booked (and cancelled) brunch at The Chimneys Restaurant along the waterfront in Gulfport, Mississippi as my culinary introduction to the state. (Ultimately, an evening McDonalds pitstop was all we’d get.) Further along the coast in Biloxi, I had planned to stop at the most quintessentially Mississippi-esque cultural curiosity I could find: a tour of Beauvoir, the “presidential” retirement home of Jefferson Davis, and very much the antithesis of the Whitney Plantation. We ended up just driving past the front gate, now shuttered for the day, which in all honesty might have been a saving grace of the day’s whole ordeal.
Big Play Entertainment Center
Instead, we continued just two miles further down the road to the small part of the plan I was able to salvage: a stop at Mississippi’s two operating parks with a permanent roller coaster. First up: Big Play Entertainment Center. This was always going to be a quick hit-and-run coaster stop, starting with the largest coaster in the state, the Biloxi Beach Hurricane.
Also present was the Tornado, a family powered coaster that, despite the name, carried an outer space theme.
With the two coasters ticked off, we took some time to cross the opposite side of the road for a brief stroll along the Gulf of Mexico. This would be the best part of the worst day of the tour.
Paradise Pier Fun Park
Mississippi’s other permanent coaster is also found in Biloxi, at a new-for-2023 seaside development called Paradise Pier Fun Park. Essentially there to give the kids something to do while mom or dad are playing the nearby slots, the park is much more clean and modern compared to Big Play, if a rather perfunctory assortment of rides picked out of the SBF Visa catalogue plopped onto the pier. At least they bothered to coordinate a matching color scheme across the property.
I purchased enough tickets for exactly one ride on the sole roller coaster, Rolling Thunder, an SBF family spinning coaster with added Hamster Wheel cars. I had ridden one of these before, but this was the first (and at the time, only) version to feature a figure eight layout, otherwise standard for the spinning cars (albeit much enlarged) but a novelty for the Hamster Wheel. I thus opted for the Hamster Wheel seating, a particularly silly choice given I had already tried one of the standard Hamster Wheel models two years before. It’s a silly novelty on the first lap, and progressively less so on each subsequent lap. (In my opinion the original oval layout works better for this concept, which includes a tiny bunny hill on the descent to get the Hamster Wheel flipping more naturally, whereas the rotation on the stretched-out figure-eight had to be forced by magnets.)
By the time I finished, the sun was close to set. I took another round of photos, then headed back to the car.
Originally I would have continued along the coast into Alabama, hooked around Mobile, and back down to the largest park along the Gulf Coast, The Park at Owa. It’s home to its own, much larger roller coaster also named Rolling Thunder, this time supplied (along with the rest of the park’s catalogue) by Zamperla.2 But with a closing time of 7:00pm, we had already long missed our window of opportunity, and besides we’d be getting into our next hotel in Montgomery plenty late already even with the straight highway shot from Biloxi.
Do I have regrets over how the day unfolded? Of course. But if one day on the tour had to go down this way, I suppose this was the least worst way for it to happen. I never expected much from Mississippi, and I ultimately got even less. But it was still just enough to satisfy my various list-checking instincts, and I’d be back on schedule the next day for more meaningful destinations I would not afford to miss.
Footnotes & Annotations
[1] Actually, a couple of those hours ended up being spent on the phone with Busch Gardens Williamsburg customer service, since I needed to change the date of my QuickQueue tickets I had purchased during the previous year’s 50% off Black Friday sale for our upcoming visit later the following week. Despite being promised that I could “book with confidence” if plans changed (pretty necessary given I was being asked to plan an exact date more than seven months in advance to secure the discount), it turned out I would have to pay the difference between the sale price at time of purchase and the non-sale price listed today. I came equipped with some pretty choice words to describe this “deal,” but it ended up being such a Kafkaesque labyrinth of questions, holds, and transfers between overworked old ladies (including being required to book a new set of passes online myself, and then read back the new confirmation number before they would process the refund for the old one, in an interaction that screamed “telephone scam” so loudly I couldn’t believe this was part of the official process) that by the time I finally got to the point where I could have made my argument, I had no spark left in me to do so. (Besides, at some point a few weeks earlier management must have found demand to be lower than expected that year, and thus reduced prices across the board by around 35%-40%, getting me fairly close to the price originally paid anyway. I’d try to make it a lesson in choosing serenity.)
[2] An even earlier version of my plans included a stop in Mobile at the Africatown Heritage House for Clotilda: The Exhibition. It was subject of the Netflix documentary Descendant (2022) about uncovering the evidence behind the last, post-Civil War ship to bring kidnapped Africans to the South. The story is astonishing, especially as it grapples with the possibilities and limitations of a museum to confront this history. However, even if we had gotten an early start it would have been exceedingly difficult to fit it all in to a single schedule. Ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered, since the museum was delayed and not ready by June 2023 anyway. With both that and the missed Owa coasters, there’s enough around that area that I could theoretically justify a return someday, although I have a hard time foreseeing the personal circumstances where I’d actually make a dedicated trip to Mobile, Alabama.