Even before I could compose a blog post about our time volunteering for shelters in Louisiana, another hurricane is making its way to South Louisiana. I’ll get to that with my next blog post but now I’d like to share the first story of two that details the journey that my roommates and I took about two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Our trip started out in Los Angeles on Friday, September 16th. After dinner, Casey, Adam and I finished packing and headed to LAX. We were taking the red-eye flight to Lafayette (near where I grew up) which is about 2.5 hours west of New Orleans. Our agenda? To help out pets affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Our plane left on time at 1:20am. We arrived in Houston a few hours later, found our terminal and slept through our 3 hour layover. We were all dressed for hot Louisiana and unfortunately it was freezing inside the Houston airport. We slept on the floor curled in fetal position with stinky airplane blankets covering us. We went to sleep in an empty terminal and when we woke up, it was packed with people everywhere. Some were staring but we didn’t care — we just got in a good 5 1/2 hours of sleep total which was totally necessary to get us through what was going to be an exhausting day.

Upon arrival, we met up with my friend Niki who had bought us a bunch of boudin and energy drinks. The boudin came from Arceneaux’s Corner Pantry in Lafayette and it was darn good. We were ready to head out at 11:30 am and we decided to go to Slidell against the advice of friends who’d heard that it was taking up to 5 hours to get there from Lafayette. They suggested that we wait until Sunday morning around 5am to head there but we had a scheduling conflict with one of our roomies and had to go on Saturday. Thankfully, the traffic was great the whole way there. We flew through most parts going 70 and arrived in Slidell at about 2:00pm.

There was evidence of the hurricane as early as the I-10 on Lafayette. Mobile traffic signs were giving suggestions on how to get around the affected areas near New Orleans. Later on after Baton Rouge, we hopped on I-12 and began to see some of the destruction as we neared Covington & Mandeville. There were thousands of trees that had been snapped in half and a lot of downed billboards.

Read more…