Whole Fish (and gumbo)

Our first night in New Orleans we hit up Coop’s Place, a popular drinking hole and eatery on Decatur Street. We had the Taste Plate, which features Gumbo and Jambalaya (with sausage and rabbit), and ventured to try the special – a whole fried sheephead fish. I can’t resist ordering a whole fish when I see it on the menu – and I’m glad I did this time because it was delicious. And huge. It all washed down quite nicely with a local Abita beer.

Big Fat Ugly Footprint

No, that’s not Jesus’ footprint. It’s mine. Or maybe Christopher’s. I honestly can’t remember whose it is, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just a metaphor anyway. This post isn’t about feet – it’s about the relatively enormous environmental impact of our trip.

Lots of people are talking about gas prices these days, and as you can see on our “At the Pump” page, the price of gas has been floating around at a record-high $3 million a gallon over the last month. It’s been hard on our wallets, but we’ve been saving up and we expected this trip to be a big drain on our bank accounts, so each time we spend 50 bucks filling up the tank I may wince a little, but the pain passes and off we go. The high price of gas may deter many Americans from driving as much as usual – and for Christopher and me it’s been more of a challenge to put the pedal to the metal.

We’re Mobile

Years ago, someone we met in passing hyped up Mobile. I don’t even remember who it was, let alone if they were a reliable source of information. But since then we’ve had a strange compulsion to visit Alabama’s third largest city. This is how we do things: eyes closed, a faint hunch, and absolutely no planning.

As a result, we rolled into Mobile looking for a place to stay and stumbled upon the Budget Inn.
What a great place right? Quaint, historic looking, within spitting distance of downtown. No. Not right. We’ve stayed in some pretty questionable places in the past (a brothel on the Thai-Cambodia border comes to mind – yes, that is a used condom in the soap dish) but the Budget Inn proudly takes a place in our pantheon of sketchiest all time lodgings.