Using Utensils

US Road Trip, Part VII

Alabama and Mississippi

After leaving the Smoky Mountains I spent ten hours crossing Arkansas and Mississippi to get to New Orleans at a decent time.

I didn’t get a chance to check out much on the way, but I did run across an odd sight, a towing caravan.

While filling up I saw a van and two closely parked cars and what I didn’t notice at first was that they were all connected!

Towing two cars at the same time doesn’t seem like the most stable thing to do, but this guy was brave enough to take all three cars on to the thruway!  :)

Touring New Orleans

Before hanging out in the French quarter, I really wanted to explore New Orleans to see how it has recovered since the hurricanes.

What we saw was very dishearting.

Years after the fact there are huge parts of the city that are still in ruins. Some areas are struggling to recover but there were multiple wards that are nothing but smashed houses and flattened city streets. More houses than I could count still had waterlines stains above the windows and doors and hand-painted search-and-rescue X’s on the walls denoting what agency searched the house and if any bodies were found.

The entire area is a macro Chicken or Egg dilemma… people won’t move back because there aren’t any stores for miles and stores won’t rebuild because there aren’t any people.

Back when Katrina hit New Orleans my friends and I had flights and hotels for the following Mardi Gras. We looked into volunteering but all of the agencies were only accepting people who could stay for multiple weeks. We had only a week in New Orleans booked so we end up canceling the trip.

Seeing it three years later, looking back on it, I really wish we had made a stronger effort to take more time off and help.