Don’t Juana Visit the Ocean?
The She Monkey and I are sitting at a Starbucks (your friendly, neighborhood wi-fi hotspot) logged in and checking in with work.
She’s doing emails; me, I caught up on four weeks of timesheets (the bane of my professional life).
We made the trip over from New Orleans in record time, save for a small batch of stop-stop-stop-and-go traffic in Mobile, Alabama and, since Saturday, we’ve been happily camped out on the beach. Camped out, as in lounging comfortably in a beach-house that sleeps 25.
Seeing the destruction in New Orleans was pretty amazing. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but whatever it was, the destruction on the ground certainly surpassed it.
It’s been, what? Eight months since Katrina hit the city and we passed through neighborhoods where people were literally sleeping in tents in their front yards. Incredible.
Navarre Beach, while hit, is still here. They’re doing major reconstructive surgery, to be sure, including pumping acre upon acre of fresh sand on to the beaches, widening them and creating a storm berm to help protect the homes.
My favorite bar on the island, Juana’s, was blown away (about what you’d expect from a tiki hut on the beach in a hurricane) but has been rebuilt.
The She Monkey and I have been going to Juana’s for fifteen years and it’s nice to see her back and open for business.
(Juana has a nice gig. She lives on a 50-foot sailboat and spends six months out of the year here at her location in Navarre and the other six months at her location in the Bahamas.)
We’ll head back on Saturday, with an overnight in Natchitoches, Louisiana (where Steel Magnolias was filmed and Jim Croce was killed in a plane crash). We should be back in Dallas on Sunday.
For now though, my next destination: back to the beach.
RespondEmail Article Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 02:51pm Mack Simpson
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