NO Adventure

I’ve been wanting to do this NOadventure for a long time. New Orleans to Pass Christian, Mississippi by scooter. We happen to own two 125cc scooters and we use them for commuting and fun, but I’ve always wanted to do a road trip. Beck had work the next day, so Pearce rose to the challenge. This is us about to leave.

The trip took less than 2 hours with a couple of stops along the way. Here’s the route we took:

We went past the park through Mid-City to Gentilly, which is basically like the black Lakeview of New Orleans. If you’ve never been to Gentilly, check it out – it’s beautiful and you can probably buy a mansion there for a song.

Gentilly Blvd. turns into Chef Menteur, which is a fabulous place to find a prostitute. We saw a couple of street walkers on our way out of town.

Further down Chef Menteur, if we didn’t already know we were in Louisiana, we would have sworn we were in Vietnam.

Once you get outside of New Orleans East, we passed by all these cool fishing camps along Lake Catherine – it’s a very enjoyable drive. Our first stop along the way was at Fort Pike, which is pretty fun, but it had just closed. Here’s us at the closed gate.

Even though it was mid-summer, we both wore long sleeve shirts and didn’t sweat at all. The scooters max out above 70mph, but we went about 55-60mph most of the drive. The scooters also get about 80-90 miles per gallon so the whole trip(both ways) cost about 4 dollars per scooter.

After Ft. Pike and the Rigolets, you come up on Mississippi pretty quickly. There’s a little marsh town called Pearlington we went through before the piney woods brought us to Bay St. Louis.

I anticipated going over some metal bridges on the way, but all of them have been replaced with really nice concrete drawbridges since our recent hurricanes. If you don’t know, driving a two-wheeled vehicle over metal grating is tricky. The most impressive new bridge is the 2-miler that spans across the Bay from Bay St. Louis to the beach in Pass Christian. A bit windy!

We finally made it to the beach!

We had alot of fun playing around in the Gulf once we were there and we even saw a couple of dolphins.

On the way back, we had lunch and stopped on this bridge for a couple of photos of the bayou as a storm loomed behind us.

Another benefit of the trip was the discovery of Bayou Sauvage. It has a cool little boardwalk trail through the swamp. I’ll have to check out more of this peaceful little park on another journey.