Re-vacuated

We're home. We got back at about 8:00 last night, after an 11 hour drive. The house is just fine. It barely looks like it was just hit by a hurricane. We have not noticed any actual damage. The back yard is littered with all the smaller and less well-attached branches from the tree. We lost all the food that was in the refrigerator and freezer. There is one window in the attic that we knew was missing a pane when we moved in, and haven't had time to get fixed yet. We boarded that window up (from the inside) to prevent rain from getting in. The portion of that board facing the missing pane is noticeably water-damaged. Other than that, we haven't seen anything that requires our attention. I bought a rake and a larger outdoor push broom earlier this evening, both of which we needed to get anyway. To top it all off, the power was even on when we got home last night.

What we've seen so far of New Orleans, both in person and in the news, suggests that our experience is representative of the city as a whole. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot of damage, though. The central coastal of Louisiana (particularly Terrebonne and Lafouche Parishes) got the brunt of the storm, and we could see a lot of damage in Baton Rouge just driving through on the interstate last night. We didn't see any damage in Lafayette while driving through there, but we did see a huge convoy of emergency vehicles and National Guard get off the interstate near there. We heard there was a lot of damage there, and we didn't see much of the city on the way through. There were also a few levee breaches in Plaquamines Parish, downriver from New Orleans. They didn't flood anyone's home, but did cause some problems there.