Gulf Coast

Wow!  I flew into Gulfport, MS, airport last week, and that place is still in bad shape. 

As we were coming in for landing, I looked down and saw a house with a swimming pool (blue) and a big, blue rectangle that I figured had to be a roof.  At the time (I wasn't thinking, I guess) I just thought they had a blue roof, like one of those metal roofs.  I saw another blue roof a ways away and thought to myself, "Well, maybe blue roofs have some sort of insulation property, or people around here just like blue."  (Like I said, I wasn't thinking -- I'd been traveling for nearly 11 hours at this point.) 

It wasn't until I saw only part of a roof that was blue, that I figured out that those were tarps.  Then, as we got closer to the gulf, nearly every roof was blue (on the houses that still had roofs).    Entire neighborhoods had blue roofs.

And there were sooooo many trees and signs that were down everywhere.  As we drove back to LA, all along the freeway, all the billboards signs were damaged.  Some were just missing the billboard, but still had the metal frame.  But many, many of them were missing at least the frame at the top, or were completely snapped off along the pole.  And there were whole sections of forests that seemed to be dying.  My dad says it's because of the storm surge and all the salt water seeped into the soil and is killing the trees.

In Slidell, it takes nearly 30 minutes to travel 2 miles sometimes, because the poor little town has an extra 100,000 people here.  The local Catholic school has two sessions of classes a day -- morning, and late afternoon.  Half the businesses are still closed, people are still living in trailers in their front yards, the local Cracker Barrel is serving everything in plastic because they're so short-staffed they can't wash dishes, and the store shelves are still pretty sparse.

I'm flying out of New Orleans, and I'm dreading heading over there.  I think it's just going to break my heart.