New Orleans

Monday, October 08, 2007
Day 100!! Today we traveled to New Orleans from our campground. The campground offers a free shuttle service to Jackson Square. Even better, the shuttle driver (a KOA employee) has trained as a tour guide and gave us a great tour both coming and going (he took different routes). He even stated that it would be useless to do the Grayline City Tour because he was taking us on most of the route. Today marked the first day of our entire trip where rain actually got in the way of our activities. The locals tell us that the rain this time of year is typically a brief shower, but today was a soaker. We were somewhat fortunate because we took a 3 hour Grayline tour of the Hurricane affected area during the heaviest rains so we were in a bus for most of the soaker. We saw some pretty depressing sights. The driver was a New Orleans native who lost her house in the floods and gave us some first hand stories of what happened during Hurricane Katrina. We drove through neighborhoods where every house was still unoccupied. Spray paint still marked the house from the first responders who searched each one. Most news clips showed the lower income neighborhoods that were destroyed, but we even saw some wealthy neighborhoods that are still unoccupied.
There are still trailers in lots throughout the town and many of the homes had trailers parked in front of them. Even the KOA we are staying at, which was not in the flooded area and about 15 miles from downtown, has about half of its sites occupied with FEMA trailers. The sight that I will remember the most is the view from the bus as we went from the neighborhoods over the canals. You have to drive up over the water level. You look back and clearly see the neighborhood significantly lower than the water level in the channels. Living in a bowl below the surrounding water level seems risky to me. On the other hand, it worked for many years.

Sunday, October 7
Today we traveled from Houston to New Orleans. We arrived at the campground early enough to enjoy swimming in the heat of the day. Poor Seth has been a little bummed out today. We purchased him a new pair of shoes at Wal-Mart a week ago because his shoes were simply worn out. However, while playing at the indoor Martian play area at the space center some kid mistakenly took his new shoes and left him some pretty poor replacement shoes. To make matters worse we had placed Seth’s second pair of shoes (not the worn out ones) outside overnight to dry. The rain soaked them. Another reminder that we aren’t in the desert anymore.