It is hard to keep America's party city down.
Judging by the frenzy of flamboyant costumes, the dancing and drinking on Fat Tuesday, New Orleans was doing its best to forget the twin disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill that brought the Big Easy to its knees.
Hotels were near capacity again, the planes were full and the French Quarter was buzzing.
"And people have come with money," Martin Driskell, general manager of Hotel Intercontinental in downtown New Orleans said. "Revenue from our lobby bar, which overlooks the parade route, is double what it was last year at this time."
Not quite a year has passed since an explosion on a BP oil platform created a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While the disaster happened after last year's Mardi Gras, the April 2010 spill hit New Orleans' tourism and seafood industries just when the city was getting back on its feet from Hurricane Katrina five years earlier. The pollution from the oil spill scared off potential visitors and diners with tales of oil damage, both real and perceived.
Let the good times roll
But in New Orleans, locals are expert at letting the good times roll in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the somber Lenten season.
Kevin Kelly's Carnival party is among the hottest tickets in town and couples in elaborate costumes lined up on St. Charles Avenue to get in.
Kelly owns some 3 million square feet of warehouse space that serves New Orleans' coffee and metals trades, and also a sprawling upriver tourist attraction called Houmas House Plantation and Gardens, where he lives year-round.
Dressed as the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte, Kelly held court in his ultra-stylish, three-story home on the avenue.
The champagne flowed as guests roamed the house and a pianist channeled Professor Longhair on a vintage baby grand. Outside on the sidewalk, passersby peered in and gawked at the costumed and tuxedoed guests through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Kelly bought the building on the parade route 15 years ago because he wanted a place where he could entertain during Carnival. After five years of renovating the once-rundown flophouse — including adding a second-floor balcony reinforced for parade viewing — Kelly opened his home to friends, family and business associates for six days of parties.
He figures 1,500 people come through his door each year in the days leading up to and including Fat Tuesday.
"The Carnival experience I provide is one of comfort and luxury," Kelly said. "You can live out your fantasies and have fun the way you like it."
Too early to tell
Tourism officials said it is too early to tell if New Orleans and Mardi Gras have completely recovered from the twin blows of Katrina and the BP spill.
After the oil spill, BP committed $30 million to help Louisiana tourism and another $30 million to promote Louisiana's seafood, mainly through the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.
Anticipating that money, the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau launched a $5 million public relations and advertising campaign across major U.S. markets last June to counter the visitor decline from the oil spill.
The money funded television network buys in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, Memphis, Chicago and Austin, plus a newspaper campaign in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and in alternative weeklies across the Southern states.
But in the French Quarter, satire was in bloom as some partygoers took aim at last year's BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Allen Logue, 58, was clad as a one-man oil spill clean-up crew. The oil field consultant from Barataria, La., didn't have to do much shopping to build his costume. He already had a hard-hat helmet and BP-branded sweat shirt from work he did for the company in Alaska.
"The only thing I had to shop for was the Jim Beam and that was to ease the pain of the oil spill," Logue said.
Logue also carried super-absorbent kitchen napkins to clean any mess he might encounter, though the most likely spill on Bourbon Street would be beer and not crude oil.
Hotel manager Driskell said occupancy was running close to 100 percent even before Fat Tuesday. At Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, spokeswoman Michelle Dufourc said that even with extra capacity added by a few airlines to accommodate Carnival demand, "the planes are all full."
Also helping is that Mardi Gras fell later in the calendar than usual this year, coinciding with spring break at many colleges and universities.
But a negative factor was the weather in New Orleans, which has been chilly and rainy, not exactly ideal for parades, said Jacques Berry, communication director for Louisiana's lieutenant governor, who oversees the state's tourism department.
Information from the Associated Press was included in this report.