Day 67 3/9 Monday, Shopping, Ships and Tropical Storms!

It was a public holiday in the USA today, Labour Day. The shops were open and very close to where we had spent the night was a “Tanger” Outlet Centre so we headed there. It was enormous and although we spent about 90minutes there we probably only covered 1/10^th of the stores. From here we drove into Mobile and visited the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. We were blown away by the whole complex and the tour over the Alabama took us quite some time. There were 3 trails we could follow over this huge battleship. We also visited the Aircraft Pavilion and the USS Drum, a submarine. It was well after 2.30pm when we finally started heading for New Orleans. The traffic was quite heavy and we kept on receiving warnings about “Tropical Storm Gordon” which will be hitting this area over the next few days. When we arrived at our accommodation we were a little concerned as the apartment was still being renovated and was a mess. Although it was located in the famous “French Quarter” of New Orleans the area looked a little run-down with boarded up houses and quite a lot of mess, old furniture and garbage in front houses. Anyway after a couple of phone calls to the Airbnb manager she said we should be in the apartment next-door. This apartment was fine….although we did lock all the doors once we’d settled in. Later, we went out to the local Walmart to shop and it was so busy. We wanted to buy some soda water and there was no water on the shelves. We asked a lady why it was so busy and she said that everyone was buying up in case the storm changes to a hurricane! It is expected to hit New Orleans tomorrow night and we are probably in for a fair bit of rain over the next few days but we’re really not that worried yet.