TUSooner
9/1/2008, 06:09 PM
I reckon nobody half remembers me since I hardly ever posted during the summer, but in case 1 or 2 of you were wondering...
We (wife, 2 daughters, my mother-in-law, dog and me) left New Orleans Saturday night my bro-in-law’s in-laws house in Slidell. We hoped to beat some traffic, which we did by staying off I-10. As expected, Slidell was ordered at 0400 to evacuate by Sunday noon, so we left at 0-dark:30 for Jackson. MS, where we had rooms reserved since early last week.
We wanted to avoid the worst I-55 trafffic by taking I-59 toward Hattiesburg, but I-59 was slow going, so we got off and took some back roads. The drive was actually very pleasant with no traffic. (Those rookie refugees can’t get off the Interstates). It would have been a lot of fun if we were going to a football game or something.
We got the hotel at 10-ish AM, but we didnt get one of our rooms until 1300 and the second one at about 1430. We got the maintenance man to get us the small refridgerator, for which we tipped him handsomely, so we’re set up fairly well. This La Quinta is not even a very good LQ, but it’s clean enough, cheap, they like pets, and we’ve had internet (most of the time, anyway). Plus, the staff is very kind and helpful.
We went to an Indian restaurant last night. This morning was all but wasted watching the news (conveniently near the bathroom). Well, we learned that New Orleans survived pretty well, but we were not especially impressed to learn from the 3972 inane news reporters on the streets that hurrcanes are windy and rainy and blow your hat off. Gosh! I expect next week they’ll report that the Sun is a very hot flaming ball of gas! We really wanted to know how the Westbank had taken the storm surge and the rain, but nothng doing. From Entergy’s internet site we learned that the power is off in our area, but then there were so many outages that Entergy shut down the web page. We assume that no news if good news and that our neighborhood probably didn’t flood, altho’ we really don’t know for sure. I hope what little we left in our fridge at home won’t go too bad too soon.
Some good signs when we left were that practically everybody seemed to be getting out, and there were plenty of well armed troops on the ground BEFORE the mass evacuation. I credit lessons learned from Katrina, and the fact that we now have a smart and competent governor. Our chocolate-brained mayor did a little better job this time, too, but that's faint praise indeed.
We expect to be here in lovely north Jackson at least another night, maybe a little longer. It’s really not a bad part of town, and Jackson’s not a bad little city either. When we go back mostly depends on the electricity situation back home. We don’t want to rush back to a dark hot house unless we have to; avoiding that was half the point of leaving!
PLEASE - don't none of y'all give me another lecture abut how I need to get out of here. I KNOW already. With the blessing it will happen sooner rather than later.
We (wife, 2 daughters, my mother-in-law, dog and me) left New Orleans Saturday night my bro-in-law’s in-laws house in Slidell. We hoped to beat some traffic, which we did by staying off I-10. As expected, Slidell was ordered at 0400 to evacuate by Sunday noon, so we left at 0-dark:30 for Jackson. MS, where we had rooms reserved since early last week.
We wanted to avoid the worst I-55 trafffic by taking I-59 toward Hattiesburg, but I-59 was slow going, so we got off and took some back roads. The drive was actually very pleasant with no traffic. (Those rookie refugees can’t get off the Interstates). It would have been a lot of fun if we were going to a football game or something.
We got the hotel at 10-ish AM, but we didnt get one of our rooms until 1300 and the second one at about 1430. We got the maintenance man to get us the small refridgerator, for which we tipped him handsomely, so we’re set up fairly well. This La Quinta is not even a very good LQ, but it’s clean enough, cheap, they like pets, and we’ve had internet (most of the time, anyway). Plus, the staff is very kind and helpful.
We went to an Indian restaurant last night. This morning was all but wasted watching the news (conveniently near the bathroom). Well, we learned that New Orleans survived pretty well, but we were not especially impressed to learn from the 3972 inane news reporters on the streets that hurrcanes are windy and rainy and blow your hat off. Gosh! I expect next week they’ll report that the Sun is a very hot flaming ball of gas! We really wanted to know how the Westbank had taken the storm surge and the rain, but nothng doing. From Entergy’s internet site we learned that the power is off in our area, but then there were so many outages that Entergy shut down the web page. We assume that no news if good news and that our neighborhood probably didn’t flood, altho’ we really don’t know for sure. I hope what little we left in our fridge at home won’t go too bad too soon.
Some good signs when we left were that practically everybody seemed to be getting out, and there were plenty of well armed troops on the ground BEFORE the mass evacuation. I credit lessons learned from Katrina, and the fact that we now have a smart and competent governor. Our chocolate-brained mayor did a little better job this time, too, but that's faint praise indeed.
We expect to be here in lovely north Jackson at least another night, maybe a little longer. It’s really not a bad part of town, and Jackson’s not a bad little city either. When we go back mostly depends on the electricity situation back home. We don’t want to rush back to a dark hot house unless we have to; avoiding that was half the point of leaving!
PLEASE - don't none of y'all give me another lecture abut how I need to get out of here. I KNOW already. With the blessing it will happen sooner rather than later.