The Fun Part

Down Canal Street we found the only working traffic lights in the city. There were some people out and about but by no means was it a crowd. The tolleys weren't running but the local buses were. We saw a 2 story pile of debris at the Child Protective Services building. They had apparently just chucked very thing out the windows on one side of the building. It had become two stories of office chairs, desks, carpet, ceiling tiles, and like debris. Next "A" sees that Popeye's chicken is hiring. They don't have windows, just boards where the windows should be. They advertised "Now Hiring-Apply inside-$9/hr" by spray painting on the front of the building. "A" was mad as she had worked there for $5.15/hr before the huricane. Her mother explained how it didn't matter since there wasn't any place to live so they couldn't come back even if they had jobs.

We found a place to park that only wanted $8 for the day. Go figure, there's only about 100 cars running in all of New Orleans but they figure they can charge them $20 to park. We walked to the river walk where the two of them could finally recongize their city and show it off to me and Big Princess. We caught a free jazz concert (almost unheard of according to "L") bought a bowl of jumbalya and I had to have a beer in New Orleans while sitting beside the Mississippi. We walked back to the van thru the historic district which looks great, bought a couple of souveniers, mardi gra beads, feathered masked, vodoo doll for little princess, you know the usual. As we're heading toward the van we hear music and see what looks like an impromtu parade. There's some people playing instruments and some dancing but no one is wearing anything that leads me to believe they are a group. Some guy is running down the side yelling "dat's Spike Lee, dat's Spike Lee". Good thing to or I'd have missed it.

At this point we are phyiscally exhausted and decide we'll drive around a little and see if any of the other wards have started repairing their communities. We see a Red Cross sanitation set up every so often still dooling out bottled water (remember its been 3 months since the huricane). We head towards the 9th ward, one of the hardest hit, as "A" wants to see the leevee and see if its truly been repaired or only make-shift repaired. We can't get back into that area as the military has all the roads blocked and is standing guard every so often. But I've got a local with me and we wind around and come at it from a different direction. We couldn't get to the leevee because there are no longer roads to it but we did get into the 9th ward.

Big Princess video's some of what we see:
cars on top of houses
piles of debris everywhere
a boat on top of a house
a pile of computer monitors the size of a school bus
a house in the middle of the street with an arrow painted on it pointing to one corner "Wicked Witch of the West"
Another home in the middle of the street simply had "please take" spray painted on it.
a whole street where the homes had come off their foundations and shifted a couple of houses down and to the back,
Most homeowners had spray painted their current contact number on the front of their houses.
Some people were living in camper trailers in their front yards. I don't know why. There isn't potable water or electricity.

So even this part was fun as we oo'd and ahh'd over the impressive destruction. I'm sure we wouldn't have enjoyed it if there were dead people or animals or even people crying and wailing. But it was deserted and quiet and we marvelled at what we saw.

We got out of town around sunset and ate Smokey Bones about an hour from New Oleans and stopped for the night as I was too tired to go any further and it had started raining. The next day we lounged until 10 am before heading to Houston to drop Big Princess off at her roommate's home.