I went to the Audubon Zoo

And they all asked for you! (that's a song btw). So yeah, we went down to the zoo Saturday. Gorgeous day, but it was pretty cold and windy.

Upon entering New Orleans the first thing I noticed was that general maintenance seems to have gone by the wayside. There was just a ton of trash along the interstate and the grass hadn't been cut. At first glance it doesn't really seem like there's too terribly much damage, but there are a lot of blue roofs and a lot of buildings that have damage when you look closer. This far out and there are still a lot of businesses that seem like they haven't made any effort to repair anything.

We got, not lost, but not going the right direction when we got off the interstate. Again, it didn't appear as though there was much damage, but we kept traveling in a direction towards the Superdome. As we got in that area you could tell that the buildings in that area had probably chest deep water in them. They were all abandoned and it looked like they were tearing a lot of them down. We kept having to stop because big machines were filling up dump trucks with debris. Also, in this area there was no electricity. No stop lights, no street signs (which isn't good when you can't get where you're going!). Anyway, we eventually got on Clairborne and things seemed better. There was sporadic electricity and it looked like the houses didn't suffer much flood damage, but they did seem to have a lot of storm damage. There were lots of people out in that area doing community clean up. The one thing that I thought was interesting is that no one looked like they had painted over those markings that the search crews put on the doors. I guess it's one of the reminder things that will probably stay around for awhile.

Finally, we managed to make it to the zoo area. Tulane starts Tuesday so that area was pretty crazy. The zoo didn't seem to have any lingering damage. Nearly all the exhibits were open. They had some hurricane humor going on there. I'll have to post pictures later.

We got lost going home too. We passed through Kenner and Metarie and things looked ok. Traffic was horrible. The main thing is that there isn't much open. Not too many restaraunts and the ones that are open have strange hours. McDonalds was open from 9-3 and Burger King was 9-5. I didn't notice any gas stations that were open. I guess that's why neighborhoods that seems to be not affected don't have too many people living in them. Although, there were a lot of street vendor type things going on.

Anyway, that's my report.

Stitching I had a good weekend. I'm almost done with my house for the Stitcher's Lane RR. Just have the back stitching to do!