Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

Finally we woke to a sunny day if not so warm. I still went with shorts because a) I am basically on vacation b) I am on the Gulf Coast c) I am Canadian. Today also marks our departure from New Orleans. On our way out we caught a glimpse of the devastated neighbourhoods along I-10. It was shocking to see houses, in very bad shape, with the grass overgrown, and with absolutely nothing inside. You could see all the way through some houses from front to back. Many houses were just abandoned. And you could still see travel trailers parked on the lawns of many others. Here we are over a year later and there is so much that looks like it has not been touched since the hurricane. We saw damage from Katrina all the way out of town as we made our way out of Louisiana and toward the land of four eyes, I mean, ‘i’s … that’s Mississippi. There were all kinds of signs still battered and smashed and stores in disrepair and we even saw a number of those big, tall, highway street lights still lying on the ground in the median! Just unbelievable to see this over a year later. We were heading to Biloxi to take a shrimp boat tour! Now you have to figure that this type of tour must have doubled once Forest Gump hit the theatres. I was hoping to jump on board a real shrimp boat but it turns out they are not all that well suited to having tourists hanging around. But the boat that we took had all the shrimp boat equipment set up at the stern so that they could actually show us how shrimping is done. It was a fun tour and I was able to take many cool photos while we were out on the Gulf of Mexico doing a little shrimping. I was surprised to find that we had some pelicans joining us for the tour. It turns out they know they are going to get all the cast offs once we haul up our catch. But I was pleasantly surprised to see some dolphins show up at the end to check things out. Of course we got a first-hand look at everything in the net. The first thing you notice is that the net appears to be totally filled with jellyfish. But once we got them out of the way we were introduced to all kinds of sea creatures including squid (you may know them better as Calamari), catfish, anchovy, a Blowfish … well, you get the idea. I had to admit that the blowfish are the coolest from a viewing perspective. The tour guide was quite a character. He had a corny joke for every occasion. After the tour we asked him about hurricane Katrina and Boloxi. He showed us some pretty incredible photos of what took place. Boloxi was hit very badly and you could see evidence of the damage almost everywhere you went. After our shrimp boat tour we drove along the beach to Gulf Port before turning northward toward Meridian. We were absolutely shocked by the seemingly omnipresent hurricane damage which was still evident over a year later. We saw steps leading up to a vacant concrete slab, where a beach-side house once stood, surrounded by overgrown grass. We saw many buildings with their parts of their walls literally ripped off. We saw lighted signs completely missing with just a metal shell indicating where the sign once resided. We even saw a hotel with all the windows blown out but with the furniture still inside and the curtains still flapping in and out of the room. There still seemed to be three missing or damaged buildings for every newly built or restored building. That is certainly not a positive bellwether. And for people who knew what things were like before the storm hit, this whole scene was likely much worse than it looked to us. Just before we left the shrimp boat, the tour guide told us he was preparing for a tour of volunteers who had come down to Biloxi to help fix things. He offers free tours to all the volunteers as a way of saying thank you to them for coming to help. I was shocked that there was still so much work to do and that there were still people who cared enough to take the time to come to help so long after the disaster took place.

Today’s word:

bellwether \BEL-weth-uhr\, noun:
A leader of a movement or activity; also, a leading indicator of future trends