NEW ORLEANS — If you want to visit New Orleans for Mardi Gras and don’t have hotel reservations, you may need a tent. But you might not even be able to find tent space for the 10th Mardi Gras since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city.
Cheap gas and a holiday trifecta are contributing to strong lodging demands. Mardi Gras falls on Feb. 17; the day before is Presidents Day, and the Saturday before is Valentine’s Day.
Hotel occupancy is usually about 95 percent for Mardi Gras, which draws an estimated 1 million visitors. One booking site Wednesday showed 184 hotels with no rooms for the weekend. Another 53 hotels had some availability, but some of them were as far as 30 miles from New Orleans, and only a dozen cost less than $300 a night.
All 98 tent and RV sites at Bayou Segnette State Park, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, are reserved for Fat Tuesday and the weekend leading into it, administrative coordinator Jill Doucet said.
For those who are heading to New Orleans, here are some hints for a happy and healthy Mardi Gras.
• PARKING. Parking along parade routes gets very tight. The French Quarter is closed to outside vehicles during the weekend, though residents and hotel guests get parking passes.
• SEATING. Bring chairs, or towels and blankets for sitting on the ground. For front-row spots, get to the route at least an hour before a parade, or several hours ahead for the huge night parades and those on Fat Tuesday. Some locals show up at dawn. But floats rise well above eye level, so even from the back, you’ll have a view. You can buy tickets for grandstand seating, but many events are sold out.
• GEW-GAWS. Grabbing for plastic beads, cups, big aluminum doubloons (replicas of Spanish gold coins) and other gew-gaws thrown from floats is an infectious sport. Bring a bag to carry whatever you can’t wear.
• LOADING. You can buy food from vendors, rolling carts, restaurants and even schools and churches along the parade routes. If you can get a reservation, dining at a restaurant with a view of the parade is a bit surreal: Outside, people scream and grab for goodies from floats; inside is the hum of conversation and clink of silverware on china. Unlike many cities, New Orleans lets you walk around with booze, as long as it’s in a can or plastic cup.
• UNLOADING. Some churches, schools and restaurants sell passes to use portable toilets on their property. The city is setting up 650 free toilets in high-traffic areas, but lines can be long. Bars, restaurants and stores also sell potty passes for their facilities or allow use them if you make a purchase. Public urination and public drunkenness are two common reasons for arrests on Mardi Gras.
• SAFETY. Signs put up by French Quarter residents and businesses, prompted by more than 60 hold-ups in and around the neighborhood since November, advise, “Caution: Walk in Large Groups.” The city police force is at just 72 percent of what officials consider optimum strength, but, as usual at Mardi Gras, 12-hour shifts, state police and sheriff’s deputies from New Orleans and nearby will supplement the force.
• FRENCH QUARTER. There are no parades there, but lots of costumes. The narrow streets are sometimes so jammed that it’s all but impossible to walk against the crowd.
• WHERE NOT TO WATCH. A major drainage project on Napoleon Avenue has ripped up the median usually available for parade viewers.
• HISTORY. The Presbytère, one of three state museums on Jackson Square in the French Quarter, has a permanent exhibit on the festival’s origins and history, with costumes and other memorabilia. Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World, 1380 Port of New Orleans Place, is where hundreds of floats are built. The Backstreet Cultural Museum, 1116 St. Claude Ave., in the Treme neighborhood, has the city’s largest collection of feathered and beaded Mardi Gras Indian costumes.
• OTHER ATTRACTIONS. Check out the National World War II Museum; Audubon Nature Institute’s zoo, aquarium and insectarium; Louisiana Children’s Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; or the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Metairie Cemetery, just outside city limits, has mausoleums. There’s so much history in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 near the French Quarter that you may want to book a tour. There also are good tours of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in the Garden District.
