Eye Opener

Today we took a little drive around town. On our tour, we drove through one of the neighborhoods that was near the lake. We keep hearing that what you see on tv or in photos really does not prepare you for the total amount of destruction around here. It's true. A photo just cannot capture the entire thing. We took a picture of this former house of which there was nothing left but the cement slab and a lone toilet still in place. The next door neighbors were living in their RV on the property. We saw a lot of that.

The houses in that neighborhood had debris piles as big as a house, and in many cases, the debris pile WAS the house. In this picture you can see a house peeking out from behind the pile. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to come home to something like this. While we are moving along toward normality relatively quickly in our neighborhood, these people are going to be putting pieces back together for a long long time.
This is Eden Isle neighborhood. The owner of the kids' gymnatsics club lives in here. We tried to find his house, but the streets are all so unrecognizable that we couldn't orient ourselves enough to find it. I'm sure it looks similiar to these though. The gym is back open again and the kids have been in classes. They have most of their employees back which is better than a lot of businesses around town.

The National Guard in Slidell have moved on and are not longer giving out MRE's and bottled water. We seem to have most of our critical services back in Slidell, so they have presumably gone over to New Orleans to help out all those folks who are just getting back in recent weeks.

It is nice to see some "normal" stuff happening again. I think most people here would agree with that.