Gail, Carolyn and Pat cleaning up the front yard.
This is a view of the side yard. You can see how high the grass and weeds were!
We made a huge pile the debris and Colleen kept stomping it down. Sherry's ready to add more!
Gail and Tom cleared the porch and front flowerbed.
Dirk and Charlie weed wacked around the house.
Jackie digs up a wild tree to take back to Michigan.
This is a view of the other side yard and backyard. Everything is so overgrown!
These trees are nextdoor. They are all dead after the hurricane.
John used a Weed Hog to clear the brush. What a time saver!!
Tom and Colleen pick out the big brush before the Weed Hog comes along.
Dirk chops out dead shrubs along the fenceline in the backyard.
Carolyn and Sherry rake up smaller debris.
This is a view of the front and side of the house after we are finished. It looks so nice!!
Ah, the nice cleaned up front lawn! Their FEMA trailer is in front of their house too.
The side of the house looked great afterwards. You can see the fence now, the shrubs and the grass isnt waist high. We were so proud of our work!
There is an actual backyard! Gosh it looks great! (Can you tell how excited we were that we did this?!?!)
Mary poses in the shade in the backyard.
This was a large pile of debris we removed. There were two other piles in the front of the house.
Here is our group that cleaned the yard. You can see the Gulf of Mexico in the background.
Mary clears a pile of debris with the wheelbarrow.
Mary and Gary at the Gulf of Mexico. It was so nice that day, but very windy!
A view of the beach.
We saw this sign after we all went down on the beach and stuck our feet in the water. Oops! Don't go Pat!!!
This is the boardwalk all torn up.
A jazz band on the street in the French Quarter.
A daytime view of Bourbon Street.
We ate on the balcony and got lots of good pictures!
The girls out to eat out, cajun style! The hurricane drinks were so good!!
Bourbon Street!!
The buildings at night.
A view of the street at night.
So our week has come to an end, and boy has it been quite a week! Friday we split up into different groups for a few morning jobs. A few guys went back to Susie's house to finish up more drywall, a few went off to another house to paint and drywall and the rest of us ended up back in Long Beach cleaning up a yard at someone's home. There was a group from Montana inside drywalling and we worked outside. The homeowners actually bought this house three weeks before Katrina. They still have their house back in New Orleans so they have been trying to go back and forth between the two houses to repair them. We included before and after pictures below of our work. It was so hot! Their house was 3 blocks off of the waterfront, but after the hurricane, they are the first house now along the water. No houses in front of theirs are still standing. It was a very strange feeling to stand there and know that blocks of houses were just gone.
We wrapped up our work around 12pm and headed back to camp for much needed naps and showers. And then, for a well deserved break, we all headed off to New Orleans!! On the ride down, before we got to the French Quarter, the destruction was very different than that of which we have seen thus far. As you can see from our previous pictures, most of the structures on the waterfront in Gulfport and Long Beach were wiped out. In New Orleans, the structures still stood but were uninhabitable. The roofs were torn, windows were blown out, walls were missing, trees were dead...it was very eye opening to that type of devistation. There were so many apartment buildings left vacant, and houses were so close together, there couldnt possibly be any room for FEMA trailers anywhere. It was heart breaking to see how much damage was done and all of the work that is still needed.
We headed off to the French Quarter and had dinner and then walked around to see the sights. We didnt stay very late, seeing as how our departure was early the next morning and we have been working our tails off this week!
This morning we left Camp Hope and headed for Bowling Green, Kentucky, where we are now for the night (thank goodness we are out of the car!). We drove through some pretty rough thunderstorms, a tornado warning and hail. It has been raining all day, which made the drive with the trailers more difficult. But with the experienced drivers we have, we made it through the worst part just fine :o) We are all looking forward to a great night's sleep in a real bed, not on an air mattress on the floor!
I will post again later this week to let you know how the rest of our trip went and with some other pictures we have to show you. We have quite a few pictures again tonight so we will save some for the last post for this trip.
Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and prayers during our trip. Your support from home has meant a lot to us! And thanks to everyone who posted comments! We are excited to read all of them every day.
G'night Y'all!
