I added some more New Orleans photos. Here.
A ride in the Canal Street streetcar in New Orleans up to the cemeteries.
This was only seven months ago. I am going to finish editing these photos by the end of the year.
I am determined.
This was the day the kids went to the Audubon aquarium and zoo and I went off on my own. I checked out the hotel/mall to see about the glass elevator I’d spotted — it only went up 6 floors or something lame like that and was all smudgy. Then I waited for the Canal Street streetcar, rode it to the end of the line. There is a surprising amount of still-visible damage in parts of the city that are just outside the French Quarter and downtown/office-y looking, rows of broken windows in highrises, that sort of thing.
There are two cemeteries at the end, I didn’t get off there because I had to go meet everyone at the sno-ball place, so I rode back to S. Carrollton, got off there. As I was waiting at the bus stop, the sky opened up and it started pouring. It was my first real warm rain, I briefly experienced one in the 90s on one of those cross-country bus trips but this was the first full downpour I was out in. I still think it’s gross.
An older man and I talked while we waited, he was of the opinion that a lot of people took their FEMA money and squandered it, did not fix up the damage to their homes, bought new cars instead. The bus did not go directly down S. Carrollton, a main street, but veered off into the neighborhood past the I-10. This neighborhood. I’m not sure what all the blue roofs on that map are — giant tarps? So many of the houses we passed were destroyed. I didn’t take any photos, there were only a couple people on the bus and I felt self-conscious enough just trying not to gawk. Most of them got off before we got back on the main road, including the guy I’d been talking to.
I rode on to Oak Street in Uptown, which is some other photos that are in my New Orleans set, stopped in at some awesome thrift stores, sat in a café alone for awhile, then walked over met the kids for sno-balls [yet more photos].