Huntsville, TX -> New Orleans, LA
Starting off early in the morning we headed south to the big meetup and sendoff being put on by MINI of the Woodlands in The Woodlands, TX. This was about a 45 minute trip south for us so it was not a big deal at all. There we met up with several of our friends from the Houston, San Antonio and Austin clubs that were going to travel more or less together to New Orleans.
The meeting was basically just a meet and greet for everyone to say hello, buy some t-shirts and get some idea as to what we were going to do in New Orleans. Once all of that was complete the dealership organized a line of MINIs and videoed us driving through their shop on our way to start our trip.
It wasn’t long before a couple of the people didn’t seem to like traveling as a group and hit the pedal on the right fairly hard, the race was on.
We had really lucked out and gotten a room at a hotel we had stayed at before and really liked, the XXXXXXXX is right in the middle of the French Quarter and one block from Bourbon Street, two blocks from some of the best bars in the Quarter.
After checking in we met with a couple of our friends and decided to hit the bars. We started off with a nice place called XXXXXXXXXXX which had some excellent live blues (go figure) and not too bad drinks. After a couple of sets there we moseyed a couple doors down to the XXXXXXXXX piano bar and it was time for things to get real.
We had lots more drinks and spent way too much money on requesting songs. One of my favorite of the night was when I requested Slade’s Run Runaway. Two of the guys just looked at each other like I had written in a foreign language but the third thought about it for a while, then not wanting to give up the $20 I put with the request (requests started at a couple of bucks, the more money, the more likely and faster you got to hear your song, $20 was enough that they learned the song in about 30 seconds, lol). About two minutes after they pulled the request out, I was listening to a remarkably good rendition of the song, and singing right along much to everyone’s horror.
I still have no idea how we got back to the hotel that night but considering how close it was, crawling was definitely an option.
New Orleans, LA -> Atlanta, GA
Amazingly enough, we got up on time and were coherent enough to get some breakfast at the hotel and head on over to the morning meeting. We all lined up and got some XXXXXXXXX from one of the most famous places in NO to get these things. While very good, I really didn’t see the huge draw for these. It isn’t like having red beans and rice on a patio in the Quarter while listening to a live jazz band and sipping on a hurricane. But I digress.
Shortly after eating our NO treats we headed out to Birmingham where the local dealership was feeding us lunch, handing out some freebies and looking over our cars for free. It was a very nice rest stop on our trip.
Arriving in Atlanta we checked in at registration and then headed to the outskirts to our hotel room. It turns out that having our hotel on the outskirts of town was a really good idea as shortly after dusk some rioting started. We managed to avoid all of that mess.
MTTS Starts
Atlanta, GA, -> Charlotte, NC
Charlotte, NC -> Tallahassee, FL
MTTS Ends
Tallahassee, Fl -> New Orleans, LA
New Orleans, LA -> Huntsville, TX
