Biloxi, MS

The trip was pretty good. This despite everything going wrong. The air conditioner in the car stopped working in Covington, LA. That's 30 minutes into our 2 hour drive. That made the trip a LOT longer. But I want to divert this post to what we saw in terms of damage.

We took the scenic highway through Waveland, MS. By taking this route, we drive through Perlington where Natasha used to live and through Pass Christian where my Grandma Pierce used to live. We got to Waveland and things looked pretty rough, but when we got through Waveland to the Pass Christian bridge, we noticed something... there was no bridge. There wasn't even much of an indication that there used to be a bridge there. There were NO houses left. They weren't flooded or torn down... they were just gone.

We went around the bay to Pass Christian to find that a town built around a beach had no beach left. We drove down the gulf coast eventually reaching Gulfport where a beach was open, but the water was closed. We finally ended up in Biloxi. Although the area around the beach was torn apart, the city around it was still in good shape. They did have one beach open, but the water was technically closed. Luckily there were enough people breaking the rules that we broke them too. Here's a before/after Katrina picture of Biloxi:

(for full size image, go here)

Simply amazing. Most of the buildings that are up in that picture have since been torn down. Those buildings were so beautiful.

So anyway, we had fun on the beach. At one point of of Natasha's nieces was stung by a jellyfish. It didn't leave a mark, but she definitely felt it. I ended up carrying both of them on my shoulders out of the ocean (more than 100 yards and they are ten years old which means they weigh more than Grace). The thing was I had been stung all over my ankle and leg, but couldn't show it because they were scared and needed me to be calm and collected. Those girls are great. I'm gonna miss them when their Mom gets back home.