I had just returned to New Orleans the Wednesday before the storm ready to start my sophomore year at Tulane University. On the Saturday before the storm hit I was woken up by a phone call from my mother in Maryland telling me that a hurricane was headed to New Orleans. She urged me to get out of town and I assured her I would but with the evacuation for Hurricane Ivan still in recent memory I thought that I would just be getting a short vacation before classes started. I did not take the threat of a storm hitting New Orleans very seriously. Ironically, the night before, my friends and I, unaware Katrina was headed our way, had joked about what we would do if we got off of school for another hurricane scare that semester. When I got out of bed and headed downstairs the cable guy was installing cable just in time for us to put on the Weather Channel and see what was actually going on. We still had no idea of what we were actually going to be in for. I remember the cable guy saying that he was not scared of any storm and had no intentions of leaving town. To appease my mother, I began trying to figure out how I was going to get out of town. Since neither I nor my roomate had cars I got on my cell phone and started trying to call friends to see if I could get a ride out of town. As the day progressed cell phone service began to stop working and no one I had talked to had room in their cars for both me and my roomate so I went over to my neighbors house and asked what there plans were. They told me I could have a spot in their car and we began to debate whether to head east to Florida or west to Houston. We decided upon Florida because we knew people we could stay with there but we were faced with the problem of trying to cram six people and all of their stuff into a my friends Ford Explorer that only sat five. One of my neighbors offered to stay in New Orleans saying that he was not really worried about the storm but we all insisted that he come and not be left alone in the house. To deal with the surplus of people in the car we decided to try to rent a car so no one had to ride in the trunk for what figure to be a long ride. Since none of us were old enough to actually rent a car my neighbors girlfriend, who had just flown into town that day, began attempting to chalked his ID so that he appeared to be 21 and could rent a car. After going over it several times we finally determined that the ID looked legitimate enough to give it a shot so we began to load the car. Thinking that we would only be gone for a few days like the year before during Ivan, I only packed a few days worth of clothing and did not even bother bringing a pair of shoes, opting on sandals instead, thinking that I was just going to be going to relax on the beach for several days. We loaded everyones things into the car and I volunteered to sit in the trunk, wedging myself between the pile of suitcases and the back of the car. Fortunately I would only have to ride their until we reached the rental car place as the chalked ID worked and they rented us a car. We got on I-10 and headed east to Tallahassee for the night. Traffic was minimal and we got there at around 2 AM. A few of my friends stayed with a relative a Florida State and the rest of us searched for a hotel room. The first place we tried refused to rent to us as they were suspicious of the intentions of college kids seeking a hotel room at such a late hour. The second place we tried was equally suspicious but eventually gave in and rented us a room. The next day we continued driving to our destination in Tampa where we all had places to stay and could wait out the storm. After it became apparent that the storm was actually going to hit New Orleans I book a flight home to Maryland for later that week. I ended up spending the fall taking classes part time at the University of Maryland as well as working part time at a restaurant. In January, I returned to Tulane and resumed working towards my degree.