Back Home from the Big (Un) Easy

Well I'm home and waiting to see when we might be headed back to New Orleans.

We left downtown at 4:30 pm eastern time on Saturday. We were able to go about 30 miles in the first 4.5 hours. Then over the next 4 hours, from Slidell, LA to Tuscaloosa,AL we were lucky when when we could go 60 mph on I-59.

After I handed off in Tuscaloosa, and went to sleep for what would wind up being a total of 3 hours of cat napping, traffic thinned out and we ran around 75 mph for the rest of the drive back.

We spent 17 hours on the road.

New Orleans was like a ghost town when we left yesterday. A city of about 1.2 million people reduced to a few stragglers, police and national guard soldiers.

I made it home in time to go to hear Jina sing with 5 other ladies at our second service. They did great, but I felt awkward and out of place. After seeing life turned completely on its head, it was hard to see life and people go on as is nothing was happening. I was actually glad that Jina, after staying for the entire first service, decided to leave after singing in the second service.

We went from there to grab a bite to eat, I was dying to eat some vegetables after eating nothing but Power Bars, South Beach Meal bars, Trail mix and one McDonalds' grilled chicken value meal for 36 hours, I was craving fruit and vegetables. That proved to be a mistake also. Again, hard to go from world upside down, to life as normal in 18 hours.

I've spent the afternoon bouncing between the Weather Channel, FoxNews, CNN, ESPN (for the UofL/UK football game), and cat napping.

Now it will be a matter of determining when we go back, what our role will be, what staff will come back (I anticipate most of them having to deal with their personal property first), what supplies we'll need (we have a pass to get into the city, but until it is opened up to the general population, once we are in we will have to be completely self sufficient and unable to leave the city), and I believe it will be prudent to consider what personal security measures we might need.

That's about it, hard to think about much of anything else right now.