New Orleans, LA November 4, 2005

Hello Everyone,

It's Friday night and we are just back from New Orleans. It was our relax day today and we used it to do laundry up in Kiln, Mississippi. Only a few washers and dryers working in one of the two Laundromats in Hancock County. We also found the "Broke Spoke" bar but it was closed. We did write our messages to Brett Favre on the wall along with hundreds of others. We also found what is left of his mothers restaurant.

We headed to New Orleans in the afternoon and found that the southbound bridge of I-10 into New Orleans was partially blown away. The north bound bridge is used for both directions. We had cafe au lait and cafe noir at the "Cafe DuMonde". We also had begneits. To die for! Then we met a friend from northern Wisconsin's daughter and passed on four quilts made especially for people she knows who lost everything. This lovely young lady led us to a quiet little street on the edge of the French Quarter where we ate shrimp, red beans and rice, greens and andouille sausages. We strolled down the same street weaving our way through piles of garbage and discarded refrigerators that smelled nasty. Almost everyone in the hurricane zone lost their frig's because the power was gone for weeks and food in them spoiled. We ducked into a "jazz" club and listened to a live group for a bit. Very nice to see that New Orleaners are working to take things back to normal.

On the way back to Waveland we found a Lowes open in Slidell, Louisiana and bought a shower curtain and curtain rods for the Hope Haven House. You do not know how luxurious a shower curtain is until you until you don't have one.

We are already feeling that we just won't have enough time to make a dent and we are thinking ahead to how we could come back down and do more. This situation will not be remedied in a few months. It will be years before the damage is repaired and twenty years before trees look like a normal landscape.

We had our first ignorant comment today in New Orleans. A man called out to us "it's time for all the carpetbaggers to go home" when he saw our plates on the truck. Our thought was "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought an idiot than to open your mouth and confirm it."

Thanks for all the words of encouragement. Love, T, C, D and T