For me Katrina came out of nowhere. On August 26, the Friday before Katrina hit, I had plans to go to the Saints game. Little did I know that it was the last time I would go to a game in the dome for this season. Every time before we evacuate for a storm or one is coming close my parents like for all the cars to be topped off with gas. On the way home from the game my mom called and told me okay there is a storm out in the gulf and they say it could come toward us and I should go fill up with gas. I figured it wasn’t anything to monstrous or I would have heard about it by now. When we got to the gas station there were long lines and it was already 11:30 or later at night. \r\nSo on Saturday my brother, my dad and I had to go down to our camp in Shell beach. The camp is still under construction and it has been my dad’s dream for many years. I had gotten woke up around six a.m. by my boyfriend’s phone with his supervisor calling him to see if he could go into to work to pick up everything in the yard. After that I went back to sleep and woke up at eight thirty. I took tens steps out of my room and got hit with go get dressed we are leaving in five minutes to go down to the camp. We had to pick up everything around that we needed to bring back home. Normally we store all the tools and equipment in a shed in the back but we didn’t want to take chances so we brought back most of the important items. On our way home we didn’t know if we could get home because of the contra flow but we found out we could. We got home around five and took a little break because we then needed to board up our own house and pack to evacuate. I didn’t go to bed till one thirty a.m. \r\nSunday we woke up about five thirty in the morning and started hauling all of our pictures and clothes and important documents in our cars. Now my family takes just about everything with us and we take all four of our cars and every single one of them is packed to the max. While we waited so we could all leave together my brother, Kevin, and I just sat there talking about how this could be the last time we saw our house in good condition. We thought for sure we wouldn’t have a home to go back to. So we eventually set out for the five or six hour drive to Brookhaven, Mississippi. We had evacuated there last year for Ivan and thought it was a nice country town. But we were really in for an experience this time.\r\nMy dad and just about his whole side of the family stay in the same hotel the Hampton Inn right off of I-55. In our one room we had my mom, my brother, my dad, my grandma, my grandpa, our cat and me. The room only had one bed and a sofa bed, you can easily see it was a tight squeeze and on top of that the air condition wasn’t working. That first night wasn’t too bad. The next morning we woke up it was just rain and wind nothing extremely bad but the electricity went out about noon. You think it’s not bad but it was we had no clue where the storm was and where it was headed. All we could go by was the radio, which had crappy reception. With the entire hotel booked, everyone talked about the storm and what they had heard from friends and family. You really never knew what to believe, one minute the city was completely under water but then we heard stories about people who never even had water at all in their house. Bad enough we had no electricity, bad radio reception but all of our cell phones had no signal. All I could do was text message, which after awhile that becomes one big pain in the butt. Around one o’clock the hotel alarm goes off. My mom was in the hall talking with some people and they had a room service lady in the hall also. So when the alarm went off my mom was like what is that? The hotel women screamed “Tornado!!!!” and ran down the hall. We freaked because we never been through a tornado and we had no clue where my brother or my father was. My heart had never pounded so hard. I freaked out bad. But it was all a false alarm. Some little kid pulled the alarm downstairs and made the entire hotel freak out more during the middle of the hurricane. \r\nSome time later that day my friend Stacy got through to me on the phone and she was in Lafayette and I’m so glad she called because she told us everything she saw on the news for half hour. Later that night my aunt came knocking on our door with her radio kind of freaking out. Aaron Broussard was on and he made it seem like the world was coming to an end. It sounded like we were in the midst of a war. It scared us to death. We didn’t know when we were going home, where we would live if we had no home and what it would be like. \r\nThe next day, we needed to leave that hotel it still had no electricity. We were dying to know what was going on. We needed to decide if we were to go to Jackson or to Baton Rouge and where we could stay? My brother’s girlfriend Jamie and her family where staying in Jackson at her brother’s one bedroom apartment and said they had electricity, so we decided to go there even though we had no where to stay. Once we arrived we found out that they didn’t have a working TV the main thing we really wanted. So we went to the hotel down the road and saw the news. Oh my God I was in awe of the site I saw. I would have never thought such destruction could have occurred from a hurricane in my lifetime. Houses destroyed, the city looked as if a bomb had just gone off and messed it up completely. It really did look like a war zone. We finally left and went back to the apartment. \r\nThe people in Jackson were so hospital. I do not think my family and I can thank the hotel manager Chris enough for his help. The next morning we went back to see more news and Chris came out and asked if we were staying at the hotel. We said no and that we didn’t have anywhere to stay. Chris told us that he would find us a room because he was in charge of that hotel and the one across the street. Plus when he found out that my father worked for an oil company that was supplying all the fuel for the trucks down in New Orleans he definitely made sure that we were taken cared of. We had a huge room just for mom, my dad, brother and me. It was nice.\r\nWell the next issue came up, school. What was I going to do? I cannot stand to be behind in school so this was important to me. Naturally my parents were more worried about the house and the camp, but I needed to know what I was going to do. My boyfriend was going to go to ULL and I knew that LSU was accepting students. Either way I had nowhere to live. I wound up going to LSU; I got to live in my dad’s boss’s camper. This was not your normal camping trip camper. Half of it was a horse trailer and the other half was the actual camper. People would use it go on trail rides where you spend the majority of your day outside. Not only did I live in the trailer, it was on the opposite side of the levy down by the river. I kind of felt like Chris Farley when he was on SNL and was the motivational speaker with the famous line “I live in a van down by the river.” It wasn’t too bad at first but after a few weeks I was ready to get out. Normally, students would love LSU but I guess I am odd because I didn’t think it was that great. I did the whole tailgating and going out thing but it was still nothing great. \r\nIn the midst of trying to adapt to this new lifestyle, Hurricane Rita came busting through. I wanted to go home because my camper wasn’t too safe but couldn’t because I had to take a test on that Friday at 1:30 and school closed at 2:30. I was mad. They gave us Monday off but not Friday when there was tornado warnings and watch all day long. That was the dumbest move LSU made. I stayed that Friday night at my friend’s apartment but they eventually lost electricity so I left and went to my other friend’s apartment and they had electricity so I stayed the night there. Saturday morning I left in the middle of Rita to back to New Orleans. It was the worst weather I had ever driven in. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I can’t explain how scared I was while driving home. But I wanted to be home so bad that all I could think was only a bit further and it will be over with. I finally got home and all I could think of was man I don’t know if I can make it this whole semester in Baton Rouge because I hated it so much. \r\nFinally one day I said I had had enough and I wanted to go home and I was determined not to give up on school. I was going to bust my butt and get the hours underneath my belt. I scheduled classes packed my things up and went home. \r\nIt is amazing how in a few hours your whole life can be completely turned upside down. I never in a million years would have thought that I would live in a horse trailer or go to LSU. I am glad I got the experience because now I can say I did it and can be prepared next time. I hope that this doesn’t happen in my life again but I will know what to do if it does.