Traveling Times

My most vivid memory about Hurricane Katrina was the amount of traveling I did in order to get some where comfortable and safe. My youngest brother had to convince me to leave and was super unaware of the amount of danger that I would have potentially been in had I chose to stay. My trip started with my brother picking me up from home and my boss at work being really upset that I was evacuating. He is an old timer that has been in New Orleans for quite some time and thought that everything was going to be fine. Anyway, so my little brother and I leave and go to Baton Rouge to stay with some of his friends on LSU's campus in a dorm!! Mind you that I was 27 and my brother and his friends were 20 that was not the most ideal of situations. I could only deal with that for one night then my brother and I left the next day to travel to Houston to stay with his parents friends. The drive was excruciating as most people know, but the space was cramped. It was 6 of us staying in a one bedroom apartment. I decided I should probably leave before people started getting cabin fever. My next stop was Austin, Texas to stay with my friends. I did this for a while but was never content as you could probably understand why. Again, my friend's house was great but there were so many people staying there that there was never a moment's peace to just sit and cry or collect one's thoughts. One more journey was in the cards for me. I decided to fly to New York to stay with my friend in Astoria, Queens. I needed to get far away where there was not a constant reminder of the sadness that was swallowing the whole south east coast of the U.S. New York was perfect. Everyone so busy and concerned with there own stuff that no one even looked at you thinking you may be a "refugee". I got a job and could even forget even if for a moment what was happening in my home town. It was great. However, I was still miserable and flew directly back to NOLA as soon as the first flight was available. I got back to a ghost town on October 19, 2005 and could not have been happier.

Citation

“Traveling Times,” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed March 29, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/45993.

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