I wasn’t even going to leave Metairie until early Sunday morning. My boyfriend woke me up at 5am with a demand, not a request, that I evacuate with him. We packed our cars (clothes for about two days each…) and he went to pick up Shannon, a new friend from UNO. She had called me on Friday and told me that she was scared of this storm, so I promised her that she could stay with me, wherever I ended up. While he was gone I talked to Mom and she eventually agreed to go across the lake to Folsom to stay with my Uncle’s mom. I didn’t mean to end up separated from her, but everything happened so fast and before I knew it I was on the road to Houston to stay with Shannon’s aunt and cousin, and Mom was left behind with the cat to make her way across the busy Causeway bridge (longest in the world, made much longer by the traffic that barely even inched its way across). Aunt Betty and Cousin Mark were definitely strange to say the least. Betty was elderly and nearly blind, and Mark seemed like one of those serial killers driven to insanity because in all of his 45+ years he’s never seen a woman in anything less than a swimsuit. Needless to say the next four nights were somewhat less than comfortable, although looking back we were so much luckier than the thousands of people who didn’t -- or couldn’t--find a place to stay. Monday was spent in front of the TV (the first of many days spent like this). My last contact with Mom had been at 11pm Sunday night, an hour before our 16-hour drive (it normally takes five) to north Houston came to an end. There was no cable at Betty’s house, so the only news we got was whatever the local station chose to show us… Birds and reporters being blown down the street, rooftops poking out of the water in Orleans parish, buildings destroyed all along the Gulf Coast. Basically the same stuff everyone saw, I imagine, except in less detail because Houston’s local news stations cared most (understandably) about the huge amount of evacuees that ended up in their city. Monday I was worried to tears about Mom, and Tuesday I was actually to the point of being sick when finally, late Tuesday night, my uncle Steve sent me a text message with the phone number for a hotel in Birmingham. He had been in Folsom too, and he had cut his way out of the tangle of trees that trapped them inside the house and driven himself to Alabama, where he could at least get enough phone service to send texts. He told me Mom was fine, although two big pine trees had smashed her car. I’ve never been so relieved. That same afternoon I loaned Shannon $259.00 for a plane ticket back to Pennsylvania at the request of her Dad. I guess the stress of sending their daughter off alone to college combined with the stress of the biggest natural disaster in US history hitting that very same place they sent her to was just too much. On Wednesday afternoon we drove her to the airport, then went back to Mark & Betty’s for the night. I had called one of Mom’s best friends, Lisa, who lives near Houston, to try to find another place to stay. Richmond (boyfriend) was really sick by this time; he had a high fever and, when he could talk, he sounded kind of like Vin Diesel. There were tons of people by then who wanted to help Katrina evacuees, but none of them were wiling to help evacuees that might potentially give them a cold. Lisa drove an hour one way that night just to take me to Wendy’s (“On the phone I could tell that you were going crazy, that you really needed to cry.” I had been crying for days already, but she was right anyway) and to a Walgreen’s to get medicine for Rich. Betty had stressed over and over to both of us that we were welcome to stay as long as we needed after Shannon left, and since we couldn’t find anywhere else we reluctantly decided to stay there until Rich’s fever went down so he could drive. Two cockroaches in my bed later I was asleep on the couch in the living room at Betty’s. At 5am Shannon sent me a text message: “Have you guys left yet?” “No, I was going to get up at about 7, shower (it had been two days), Pack up the cars and be out of here by 8:30.” “You need to leave as soon as possible! You should go now, while they‘re asleep.” This was getting to be completely over the top. But, considering the completely chaotic week I’d already had, I didn’t have the capacity to do anything but what she told me I should do. So I woke Rich up, we snuck around gathering our things and packing the cars, left a thank-you card and salt-shaker set on the couch, and we were on the road again. We were headed to Folsom to get Mom and decide what to do from there. Even going to Folsom was a major decision -- it was days before Dad (who was stuck on a couch at home in Alaska with nothing to do but be worried sick about me) agreed that I could go there. All the stuff on TV was pretty frightening, and he was really reluctant to have me anywhere near it. Of course, barely fifteen minutes into our journey home, Rich’s back tire blew out on the interstate. We pulled into what turned out to be the shadiest area of town and eventually got a nice boy with a gold tooth who worked at a nearby gas station to lend us the jack out of his Explorer. Rich put on the spare tire, we cleaned up as best we could in the bathroom and started out again. Our 16-hour trip to Houston was shortened to a mere 7 hours on the way back to Folsom. We stopped at Rich’s parents’ house in Abita Springs (a big tree went through their roof) and his mom gave us some MRE’s that the Red Cross had been giving out by the case on street corners. After that our experience sort of blurred into the same one that everybody else had. Living in a two-bedroom house with twelve other people, two dogs, my cat in the laundry room and no power anywhere (they ended up finally having their power restored two months and one day after the storm hit), waiting in line for 3 hours to get $50 worth of gas, then going back to the end of the line to do it all over again.. A profound appreciation for the Red Cross and nightmares where the lady in FEMA’s hold line gives you instructions in English, then Spanish, then English again for hours and hours until you finally just give up and decide to try again the next day…We left Folsom a week later for a state park just outside of Birmingham that had “FEMA trailers” for evacuees that needed them. We enjoyed that much more civilization for three weeks before moving again, this time to Panama City, while we waited for the OK to come back home to our apartment. Just over two months after the storm we finally got the call from our landlord, and now we’re doing our best to start over here – all 3 of us are looking for jobs, I’m going to visit Dad for Thanksgiving (so that they can all see for themselves that I really did survive), and my cat is finally starting to recover from being dragged all around the country and stuck in little closets and kennels for what probably seemed like an eternity. I have a feeling it will be years before everything is normal again, and even then our city won’t ever be the same. No matter what, it’s good to finally be back home.