New Orleans #4 #5 Mis-a-sip, al-bam, National WWII museum

Tuesday was our road trip day. We needed to visit some states we had never been to (we needed to check them off) so we had a road trip. I studied what would be fun to do on the Gulf coast in Mississippi and Alabama and was pretty stumped. I found a shrimp boat ride in Biloxi Mississippi, that is what we did. This was a science boat for tourists. They put out a shrimp net and a chain to dredge up the bottom of the water for 20 minutes and took up their catch, talked about the sea life they found and released the catch....sort of, the seagulls picked it up as fast as they tossed it back.

They were pretty excited to catch a 35 lb red fish in their net. They had never done that before, when the boss takes pictures, you know it has to be good. We liked the tour and learned things about the fish they caught.... shrimp, crabs, jellyfish and about 15 other fish. They mentioned that shrimp are the cheapest they have ever seen. We stopped and talked to some fishermen and bought some shrimp on the way home from our road trip.

quote from Forrest Gump: Bubba: Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it.

Back to the road trip, When we got to Alabama we saw some cotton growing along the side the road and had to get out and investigate. In Mobile we found a 1 hour Mobile City tour, took it and felt like we had seen Mobile.

On our way home we picked up the 72 lbs of shrimp, and spent two hours cutting heads and tail spears off the shrimp (13 count per pound=900 shrimp...I think we will start at the top of Bubba Gump's list and work our way to the bottom). One thing about fresh shrimp, it hardly smells.

Today we spent the whole day 9-4:30 at the National WWII Museum. This is an excellent museum with great displays, eyewitness accounts, tour guides and films. Their expansion opens next month and they assured us that would take a full day too. We highly recommend the National WWII Museum. Why is it in New Orleans? Mr. Higgins, the guy that designed 80% of the WWII boats is from New Orleans and they were built there. More wicked afternoon Thunderstorms...