I\'m long-winded, so bear with me.\r\n\r\nI\'ll start by saying that I was not aware that a hurricane was heading toward New Orleans until that Saturday morning before it hit. One reason is because I don\'t watch the news much. (Still don\'t). The other is that it was the first week of my last semester at school (Delgado Community College), so I was preoccupied with class schedules and buying books. That Friday, I blew off my sculpting class and stayed home and slept. I also slept in Saturday. At about 9:30 I got a call. The phone rang and rang and I let voicemail pick it up. When I finally got up, it was a call from my younger sister who lives in Covington. She was very worried about how my mom and I were going to get out of the area since we didn\'t have a car. (We caught busses and the streetcar almost everywhere). I really didn\'t take her seriously, and clicked on the TV. As I was flipping through there were a couple of news conferences in parishes outside of New Orleans where they were suggesting that people leave. Then I saw the hurricane on the radar map, and it\'s kind of hard to describe what I felt. It didn\'t even really seem like a hurricane, but kind of sentient in a way. I started running around like crazy piling stuff on higher ground. By higher ground I mean the beds, the sofa and the dining room table, which turned out to do not a bit of good. I called my other sister who lived with her husband and kids on Louisiana Avenue. She had waken up to her husband and 10-year-old son trying to pack their entire house on the top of their 2 cars. She also felt that they were overreacting until she saw Katrina herself on the news. My mom was at work (Sears in Metairie). It was decided that they would pick me up and then get my mom on the way out of town once contra flow opened. We kept calling my mom at work to tell her what was happening. Her personality is very laid back and easygoing, and she thought we had just gotten overexcited. But we called her so many times, she finally decided to go on a break. When she got to the breakroom, she saw Katrina on the news and asked \"What time do you want me to be ready?\"\r\n\r\nI think it was about 4 or 5 when contraflow opened. I only left with what I was wearing, and some important papers (student loan documents), because I really felt that it would be a weekend thing and we\'d be back in a couple of days. As a result, I lost every drawing, sketch and painting I had created up to that time and I\'m still not over it. \r\n\r\nWe didn\'t know where to go, and between us (myself, my mom, my sister, brother-in-law, the 10-year-old twins, the 5-year-old and the dog), we had maybe 60 or 70 dollars. Our \"plan\" was to stay in a motel a couple of nights and drive back once the mayor said it was okay. We had no intention on leaving Louisiana, but there were \"no vacancy\" signs at every place we passed. Before we knew it we were in Texas. It was dark, it was hot, and nobody wanted to be in that car any longer than we had to. We found a \"motel\" in Beaumont called the Castle Hotel. Go to Google Earth and get a good look at it. It\'s one of those places where the manager did not know how much to charge us for a whole night because people usually didn\'t stay there that long. But it worked out--we got a good rate. My mom slept in the chair. My sister, brother-in-law, the two girls and myself slept crossways in the bed and the boy slept on a piece of cardboard on the floor. But, it was temporary. When Monday morning came, we were packed and glued to the TV, waiting for Mayor Nagin to tell us it was okay to come back in town, but all we saw was a city under water. \r\n\r\nWe were out of money, but we contacted our fellow church members and they housed us until we could do the FEMA paperwork and try to figure out our next steps. \r\n\r\nThings worked out VERY well for us, and by that I mean that we did not lose a soul out of our entire family, which is quite large on both sides. My mom and I found an apartment here in Beaumont (though I did detour a couple of times to Arizona and Seattle) and are still renting from the same company. My sister\'s family also were able to found excellent housing very quickly. I learned about medical transcription from a friend at my church, and have been doing that from home now for almost 4 years, which I absolutely enjoy.\r\n\r\nI still tell my mom somestimes that I want to go back. She\'s originally from Mississippi, so she doesn\'t miss New Orleans like the rest of us do.\r\nBut will I come back? Probably not. I visited twice, once the following June (2006) and once last November (2010). It\'s not the city I remember. I lived in the 9th ward from the age of 3 to 26--first the lower 9, then the upper 9. I googled my old address on Benton Street. The brick double is still there, and the house next to it where a boy named August lived. There isn\'t much else around except grass and the look of total desolation. \r\n\r\nI was at work one day when I was living in Mesa, AZ, and looking really depressed I guess, when one of my co-workers asked me why I didn\'t just go to another city in Louisiana instead of moving so far away. I told her: \"Once you\'ve left New Orleans, you\'ve left it. There\'s no other place like it.\"