I arrived in New Orleans and moved into my new apartment in the Lower Garden District on August 25 and was looking forward to starting classes at Tulane School of Public Health the following Monday. Here\'s the story of what happened to me when I evacuated, copied from my pen-and-paper journal.\r\n\r\n***\r\n\r\n8/29/05. Here I am lying on the floor of a Sunday-school classroom in a Baptist church in Port Gibson, Mississippi! It\'s been a crazy couple of days...\r\n\r\nI made it down to New Orleans with my parents Thursday afternoon, moved my stuff into my apartment, and after they left early Friday morning, I was sitting around, waiting for Monik (my roommate, who was home in Maryland taking her board exams) to get back and for school to start. Then Saturday morning I woke up to the news that Hurricane Katrina had changed course and was heading straight for the city... I spoke with the security guy at the front desk of my building and he told me that I\'d be safe in my 3rd floor apartment, so I went and bought food, filled saucepans and the bathtub with water, and prepared to hunker down and wait out the storm.\r\n\r\nSunday morning, the city was more deserted than usual, workers were sandbagging the entrances to buildings, and the street cars weren\'t running. After I tried and failed to get some money out of the ATM, I met a guy named Rene on the street who offered to buy me a drink at Igor\'s bar at noon, probably hoping he could get some disaster sex... but when I got in my building, the storm had been upgraded to a Category 5 and the mayor had ordered mandatory evacuations from the city, the first time that had ever happened. Since my dumb ass had parked my car in a garage at the Tulane Medical Center the day before, I had to make it over there, so in a panic I threw some clothes and food into my suitcase and ran out onto the street to wait for a bus downtown. It never came, so I started trudging my way down there, my suitcase banging against the backs of my knees and my shoulders sore from my messenger bag. I passed by a couple of girls waiting for the same bus just before the I-10 overpass, and I waited with them for a few minutes, but the bus still didn\'t come and I kept walking along the dirty streets to the parking garage, feeling a bit like Scarlett O\'Hara fleeing from the siege of Atlanta, just sweatier and with banged-up legs.\r\n\r\nOnce I got to my car, I got a little lost and ended up driving by the same corner where the two girls were still standing, so I offered them a ride. They were two French au pairs who worked in Chicago and had come to New Orleans for the weekend on vacation, and the poor things were desperate to get to the airport to get a flight out. We hit some snafus with the contraflow lane on I-10 and had to cross over the median and then take a big fucking roundabout detour, but by God, I got them there, and then got on Airline Highway (US 61) to get out of the city, which seemed like it would be a little faster then the expressway.\r\n\r\nAs for the ride... let\'s just say that it took me about 6 hours to make the 90-minute trip to Baton Rouge, and from there I kept going along Highway 61 becuase it was going north to Natchez and I thought I could get a room there. I was a little scared because I didn\'t have any maps with me, but once I was north of Baton Rouge I stopped for a coffee and bought an atlas and kept driving, tired as I was.\r\n\r\nMississippi is very pretty at sunset, with the pink clouds blending in with the red dirt at the side of the road, and everything, even my skin, suffused with a pink glow. But after sunset, it gets pretty damn dark, especially when all the hotels are full in Natchez and you have to keep driving through the darkness to parts unknown.\r\n\r\n***\r\n\r\nI drove about ten miles north to a little town called Port Gibson and stopped at a bed-and-breakfast, but they were full and told me to go to the Baptist church up the road a ways. I was so tired and so buzzed from the 20 oz. of coffee I\'d drank that my whole body felt like it was vibrating, and I could barely squeeze any words out. When I made it to the church, I made friends with two lovely older ladies, Laura and Jeannie, who I crashed with on the floor of a Sunday-school classroom. We made friends with another family, Tony and Judy R. from Metairie, their teenaged kids Nick and Chelsea, Judy\'s mother Dolores, and their Jack Russell terrier Roxy, who were staying in a larger room down the hall. As you can imagine, we all slept like the dead that night.\r\n\r\nWe ate breakfast the next morning at a darling little cafe down the street, the \"Restoration Cafe\", who stayed open just for us refugees, and we spent the rest of the day waiting and trying not to get bored. The church fed us a wonderful lunch - hamburgers,hot dogs, vegetable soup, and four kinds of desert - and soon after lunch the wind began to pick up, and we watched from the windows and doorways while the storm got stronger and stronger, knocking over trees and tearing shingles off of roofs. The power went out around 5:00, and in spite of it, the Methodist church across the street had a little dinner by candlelight, and we all munched on sandwiches and lemon bars with some other people from the town that ventured over.\r\n\r\nPeople have been so gracious in this town, it\'s unbelievable. We\'re all planning to make a donation to the church, and I\'d like to write a letter to the local newspaper praising their generosity.\r\n\r\nWe don\'t really know what to do next. We can\'t get back into the city, but the R.s are going to try to stay at Judy\'s mother\'s house in La Place, and the two ladies I\'m with are going to Laura\'s house in Covington. We can\'t get any specific news about where they\'re going, so we\'re just hoping the houses won\'t be underwater when they get there.\r\n\r\n8/31/05. I ended up with the nicest people yesterday... the H. family, who live in a beautiful house on the grounds of a former plantation north of Port Gibson. In the morning my \"disaster buddies\" left to get back to Louisiana, and I was going to stay at a church deacon\'s house for the day, but as I was waiting to follow him home, Martha H. pulled up and offered me a room at her house. I gladly accepted because she still had running water, and since I\'d chatted with her briefly the day before about her son and daughter-in-law that live in Grand Rapids and knew she was nice.\r\n\r\nI followed her back to her place, took a much-needed hot shower, and relaxed a little before I went down and met Martha\'s husband Sonny amd gorgeous son Jeffrey (who was unfortunately married, but I met his wife Jamie later and liked her immediately). We chatted for a while, looked at photos from their church mission trip to Peru, and talked about hunting before they took me out in their Scout vehicle to raise hell on their back property. I had the pleasure of meeting Sonny\'s son Derrick, who is the 2005 World Champion of Hoot-Owl Calling, and even got to hear a demonstration! At one point riding around in their pine forest with them, hearing them talk about gators and tenant farmers while trying to drive over fallen trees, I thought to myself, \"How in the hell did I ever end up here, having so much fun with these people?!\" and then just sat back and laughed as the Scout alomost toppled over into a creek.\r\n\r\nThey fed me dinner, gave me a place to sleep, and generally made me feel like family. I\'ll always be grateful to them, and I made a donation to the church\'s Peru mission fund since they wouldn\'t take any money. Jamie even gave me a beautiful ceramic leaf she\'d made as a gift, after Martha told her how much I\'d admired the pieces I saw around her house!\r\n\r\nToday I left early to make the drive to Tennessee. I drove along the Natchez Trace Parkway for a ways until construction forced me off, drove across the Mississippi into Arkansas (just so I could say I\'d been to Arkansas, and that I\'d finally ,after 23 years, crossed the Mississippi), and visited Graceland when I got into Memphis. Seeing Elvis\'s butt-ass ugly shag carpeting and fur-covered bed made the whole trip worthwhile. :)