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Nov272005
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Home, Again |
Mom, Dad and I drove back to New Orleans today. I had to get up early this morning as we were to leave before ten. The car was packed pretty tight with a lot of stuff mom had with her during the three months she was living with Larry, Anne, Chelsea and Grandma Laughlin. Goodbyes were rather emotional due to the difficult and unfortunate circumstances of the last few months. The drive home wasn’t out of the ordinary. Nine hours, five stops, two cokes and two bags of beef jerky. We stopped for lunch at the Cracker Barrel outside of Montgomery, Alabama. I had never been to one of these places before. The gift shop was cute and the food was good. I had fried catfish with fries, macaroni & cheese and cole slaw. As we approached the city, we had to merge into one of the two twin spans. Both were severely damaged by Katrina and only one of the two has been fixed. Driving through New Orleans East, it was hard to see anything as it was completely dark, both because it was night and there is still no electricity in the area not that it would matter as many of the homes were destroyed. The only light came from the windows of FEMA trailers. As we got closer to downtown, you could see more lights businesses that had reopened, street lights, and then homes. We had to stop at the train station downtown to retrieve my car, which we had to leave when we took the train to Atlanta. We got home around 7:15 and unloaded the car in the sporadic rain. It started pouring pretty heavily soon after. The power went out at ten minutes to eight. It stayed out for over an hour. I wanted to get things organized and cleaned up in my room but I couldn’t see. The power came back on just after nine. It went out again half an hour later and was out for about 20 minutes. When it came back on again, I used my computer for a while before going to bed.