Biloxi - lazy day

  Biloxi, Mississippi, United States
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

A lazy day doing nothing really > we went to the beach last night and it has been wiped out, the houses along the waterfront are now just slabs with all the debris taken away in huge black-sided dumper trucks. There are lots of leveled plots for sale but I guess no-one wants to take the chance or they can't get insurance. That said there are a number of new hotels and the casino's have all been re-built. You can now gamble on-shore(previously the hotel was on-shore and you walked out to a huge barge to gamble!!). We believe they've done this to get the casino's to re-invest, otherwise there would be nothing on the front.

We had another great steak meal in Outback (sorry Laura) and our server (from Ohio) was really chatty - spent the whole meal just sat at our table talking with us (don't know who else he serving but i guess they didn't eat 'til late!).  He's going to Germany with his girlfriend to see where she was born (Heidelsburg - her dad was in the Army) next year. We explained that UK would be very expensive for them right now. He was interested in our "the world's view" of America and we had to admit it wasn't great. He seems to "speak" with many non-Americans whilst playing computer games and seemed very knowledgeable about this which is something fairly unusual in our experience so far.

This morning we went to Beau Rivage - one of the larger refurbished casinos this morning. It has 1,700 rooms and the rate was $129 per night (we asked) and they were FULL!! Crazy especially when all the food/coffee was 50% more than in places nearby. Let's hope Vegas doesn't get to hear about it. We managed to lose $6 on blackjack after some finger trouble from the Chrissie one.

Onward to the lovely huge, silver-sanded beach which we had to ourselves (albeit the sea looked really awful and is apparantly still quite dangerous after all the crap that washed out of New Orleans), then we came back to the hotel and sat round the pool for a while. It's up in the 80s again today so we're not going mad sunbathing.

The pictures below show some of the sights of the devastation in Biloxi.

Three smashed buildings on the shorefront:

Smashed Building on Biloxi shorefront

Another smashed building

Not open today!

The lovely beach that we had to ourselves

The spectacular beach but don't go in the water!

Finally an ex-hotel with a tresspassers warning!! You can click on the title words to get a full-sized picture to see the hand-painted "sign".

No tresspassing!!