August 28, 2005 I left my house thinking I\'d see my father the following day. I thought I\'d continue highschool at Mount Carmel on Monday. I thought it would be a routine evacuation that would end up being a \"mini- vacation\" that consisted of margaritas and drunken board games with my family. I had no idea I was going to spend seventeen hours on I-10 going to Houston without air condition. This particular evacuation scared me because I had never seen so many cars leaving the city at once. This was the first time where I felt like I was abandoning my city, most importantly, my father who was then working for LSU med school operating the student housing, less than a football field away from the Super Dome. I remember falling asleep in our 93\' Previa somewhere near Lake Charles and before shutting my eyes I noticed a Waffle House on my left. I woke up some three hours later and that same Waffle House was two blocks behind us. The rest of that evacuation has been blocked from my memory, probably for the best. The next thing I remember was waking up the next morning and sitting on my Aunt\'s couch in Katy, Texas and the news was showing a video on repeat of a man after being rescued from the roof of his 9th Ward home talking about him letting go of his wife\'s hand and her drowning. This, for me, was a huge wake up call for me. It was a nightmare. That video has been burned into my mind. Whenever I hear the words \"Katrina\" or \"hurricane\", I think of that man\'s face. Then I remember seeing a video of an aerial view of Lakeview. I new my school was gone. We waited six days before being able to see my dad. I don\'t remember who rescued him or exactly when, but I know he was air lifted to the Louis Armstrong airport. He met us in Houston. Seeing him for the first time since the storm hit was terrible. He was dirty, had a beard, and he was wearing the same thing I saw him in the day before the hurricane. He just had this blank stare on his face like he had seen a ghost or something. Seeing him like this scared me. Knowing that he was vulnerable and had been affected this strongly, worried me. He never talked much about what happened. He did tell me that he video taped the storm hitting. He also said he heard gun shots from the Super Dome. But the worst he said was the airport, with bodies everywhere and people looking for their loved ones.