we're here!

We drove (by which I mean Petra drove and I doted on her) eleven hours straight today, leaving Knoxville at 6:30 am and arriving at the Hands On New Orleans building at 5:30 pm. Because we took great care of them, Petra's hands are doing fine. The drive went surprisingly quickly, thanks to a rather amazingly engrossing murder mystery book-on-tape my brother had loaned us. (Thanks, Reede! You saved the day!) We drove through half of Tennessee, a corner of Georgia, plus diagonally across Alabama and Mississippi and a snip of Louisianna. A little more than 600 miles today, making a grand total of 1,896 miles from Boston to here. Yes, mothers, we will change the oil now.

About 80 miles from the coast, we started noticing the wind damage. Trees stripped of limbs, mostly, and the bare skeletons of gas station signs. Then there was a weird mile of rolling fields full of thousands of brand new white gleaming trailers, unoccupied, locked up in chain-link enclosures. We assume this was FEMA's work. The closer we came to the city, the more bizzare mountains of rubble and abandoned bulidings and general damage there was. The neighborhood we're in is pretty posh--we're one block from Magazine Street in the Garden District--and seems pretty completely recovered, from what we can tell from a quick turn around the block. This building is chock full of volunteers, energy and laughter.

More tomorrow!