I made my end-of-the-season business trip that morphed into 10 days away from home. Since my son has no way to get to work during the week if I’m not home, I asked him if he wanted to come with me. He said yes. Early in the summer, there were a lot of problems at the Destin Airport that resulted in lines for TSA screening that were 3 hours or more! I knew this would set my anxiety off, plus the car rental rates there were high. I poked around and it was cheaper to fly into New Orleans and the car rental was about $200 less. It was a bout a 4 hour drive to Destin, but I could also tack a couple of days in New Orleans onto the trip. This was enticing since I had never visited the city.
And this is how I ended up in New Orleans 4 days before Hurricane Ida hit. As of when I left on Wednesday (the 25th of August), the City really had no clue what was coming. In fact, we took a 3 hour historic tour on Tuesday the 24th where the tour guide/driver showed us what happened in Hurricane Katrina and how the levees failed. He discussed changes made and not made and said we’d see how good it was eventually. None of us had an inkling “eventually” was only 4 days away.
When I arrive home today, I put on The Weather Channel. I’m normally a “Weather Channel Junkie” anyway, so I wanted to see what was going on in the city I’d been in days before. There was Jim Cantore a block from the hotel we stayed at (I recognized the Starbucks where I bought my New Orleans mug).
I think of all the homeless I saw when we were there. There were quite a few. The City didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for this Hurricane, so I don’t know if they managed to get any or all of them off the streets. Likewise, I am a fan of the show “Pit Bulls and Parolees” and their warehouse home is in an area that flooded pretty badly in Katrina. They are in the process of moving to a new facility, so they are facing multiple locations that care affected by Ida. I just saw a Facebook post that the old location (the one on the show if you’ve seen it) lost their big garage door. All of the dogs and people here are on a higher floor right now.
I’m praying for the people in the Hurricane’s path.
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Categories: Opinion, Personal Stories, Travel
My sister is in Pensacola Beach and they were preparing, just in case. Ida stayed to the west but they still had 50 mph gusts of wind and a fair amount of rain and very rough sea.
Florida seems to have been spared the worst of this. Louisiana got hit hard and Mississippi looks like they have a lot of issues connected to flooding.