I have a theory that one should always take flights in the morning and that the later you leave a city the more likely it is that you will run into delays.
Yesterday we left New Orleans around noon and went to the airport for our 3:00 flight. Thunderstorms in Philadelphia and other cities in the northeast had made a lot of planes late, and ours took off 80 minutes late. The pilots and crew did a good job of getting people boarded and we took off fast, but then we had to circle over Philadelphia while everyone on board wondered if they would miss their connections.
We need not haven't worried. When we got the Philadelphia all the gates were crowded with people and all flights were delayed about two hours. George and I discovered a flight leaving for Boston earlier and the kind gate agent got us on that flight. Sometimes airlines will not let you change flights once your bags have been checked, but US Air let us and George says he thinks that the people who make the really big decisions at airlines are the gate agents. The nice young lady got us on the earlier flight and we were home by midnight...about two hours later than scheduled but grateful to be home at all.
This morning we drove to Logan and picked up our bags. That process went swimmingly and George had the bags in just the amount of time it took me to circle the terminal. Hooray! Now we are home and we have our bags too. Awesome!
Our trip to New Orleans was great. It is a city of people who are hoping that things improve and several people welcomed us and told us to come back and to tell our friends. They want tourists to come again and enjoy the city like before. No one has to ask "before what?". It is also a city where people have been hurt. The dumpsters are everywhere as construction continues and businesses remodel after having been flooded. Several restaurants and a few museums are still not open although the French Quarter was not as hard hit by the hurricane. The trolley runs, just not as often. There are tourists, just not as many. We heard a lot about the Musician's Village being built by volunteers and how important it is that affordable homes are available for the musicians so that the music never stops.
When I asked one cab driver if there were plenty of places to live, he said, "Yes, but since the hurricane the prices for rent have gone up at the same time salaries have gone down." He said that employers want to pay minimum wage of $5.50 an hour, and that the people who left after the hurricane and went elsewhere have discovered that although it costs more to live, they can earn $15 an hour or more in other cities. In New Orleans people are hurting and jobs are scarce and everyone just wishes it had never happened.
Some tourists we met on the airport shuttle told us about the hurricane disaster tour (Greyline, $50 p/p for three hours) and the devastation they saw first hand. They said that the area that is now unlivable goes on a lot further than they imagined, and that it is clear that something should have been done a long time before this. On the way in from the airport we saw ruined houses with trailers in the front yard where people have been forced to live, and it is clear to me that living in a trailer as small as that for years is NOT an answer! FEMA had refrigerated trucks of ice that were just emptied THIS WEEK...two years they have been standing there. Millions of dollars of ice and energy wasted while people are in such need for homes and help. It is hard not to get mad.
Everyone talks about how the insurance companies refused to pay up and how many folks just lost everything. If you had flood insurance the companies said it was wind, and if you had NO flood insurance the companies said it was the flood that took your home. Either way, the premiums you paid for years were wasted along with everything else. FEMA is such a bad word you don't even use it there! I got the impression that people were willing to talk about the problems, but that they didn't want to ruin your good time. They wanted to show you what happened, but they also expected you to pay for the privilege. We asked our bellman if we could perhaps get a cab driver to show us just a bit of the flooded neighborhoods without taking the full bus tour and he said that there is a "standard rate" of $30 per hour with a two hour minimum." That's ok. They need the money. No one complains.
New Orleans is a city that has been hurt as much by the decisions of people as by the storm. New Orleanians are discouraged and I don't blame them. The headlines talk about the "big one" and how the Corps of Engineers still has not bolstered the levees enough that if there was another hurricane the same or worse would happen again. They say that this was NOT the big one, that this was a category 2 hurricane that passed New Orleans by...but that the failure of the levees made it a national disaster. Everyone blames FEMA, the Corps of Engineers and the bureaucrats for years of waste and mismanagement that almost ruined their city. No one can even imagine what would happen if "the big one" comes.
I'm happy that we went to New Orleans and did our part to help recovery in some small way. The city is open for business and the music, the restaurants, and the museums are open and ready for customers. The music is fabulous and the people are lovely and we felt safe and as comfortable as you can be when it is all happening at summer's slow boil.
We all just wish Katrina had never happened!
Have a great day.
