Before this camping trip (I hesitate to call it a trip since I’m going ton two years now) I had never been to the South. Since embarking on this incredible voyage, I have checked off the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and revisited Texas.
During this trip, I have encountered the extremes of laws surrounding the sales and consumption of liquor. In Alabama, I passed through dry counties, which completely ban the sale or consumption of beer, wine and liquor. Dry counties exist in Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennesee. In Kentucky, Bourbon County is dry! So is the county that is the home of Jack Daniels – Moore County in Tennessee! There are lots of places that have varying laws on when you can buy, where you can buy and where you can drink.
Then there is New Orleans. In New Orleans, you can buy alcohol 24 hours a day with no restrictions. You can buy a bottle of whiskey at a gas station, walk down the street with a drink in your hand, even buy a drink in a bar to go! You can take that drink to another bar and no one will even bat an eye. Have your kids with you? You can buy them a drink and they can drink it. They even have drive-through daiquiri stores! Having a drink in your car in New Orleans is legal if it is in a plastic cup, with a lid and the straw is not inserted into the cup. Public intoxication is not illegal unless you are causing trouble. The laws there ar heavily influenced by French Creole culture.
On top of having extremely relaxed liquor laws, it is super cheap to drink there. My favorite hangout sold mixed drinks for $2.50 during happy hour and they were only $3 normally. A can of beer was only $2.
Ironically enough, you didn’t see a lot of overly drunk people stumbling in the streets. Most people were happy, but I don’t think I encountered a single person that was falling down drunk.