God Bless the Guards and Police!

Left Beaumont about 5am. Found gas in Crowley for $2.37 a gallon. Filled up car and spare gas cans. Got to Houma about 10am. Stopped at Wally World and bank. Stopped at Burger King drive thru. They had a sign up that they were out of a large list of condiment type stuff like lettuce and tomato, pickles, etc. All they had was meat, bread and french fries. Oh, well, we were hungry anyway.Clear sailing all the way to the 310 bridge. Then it was stop and go all the way to Avondale. There were signs all the way from Houma saying you couldn't get in without a Jeff Parish ID but no check points anywhere.We took Lapalco and there wasn't any traffic at all. The "Oh my God"'s start right there. The road had been cleared but the destruction was everywhere. The road was blocked by troops and Entergy crews at the Algiers Wally World. We uturned back to Holmes and made it to the Expressway then to G. DeGaulle to Shirley Drive to G. Myers/Newton and up Atlantic. Checked on the Keeney's house. It looked like they had just boarded up and left. Same with Joe and Kay's on Opelousas. Power lines were down out front but the house looked good from the front at least. Then home - I couldn't figure out what was wrong at first - the screen door had either blown off or been torn off and there was bright sunshine all over the back yard. The two beautiful holly trees were blown over. In addition to another tall sycamore. Bob sez "Well, the good news is - You can grow stuff in the back yard, now."
Inside, we thought that either the cats had died or crapped all over the place. Pan (the big orange tabby) and NoNo (young black cat) were fine. A little pissed, but okay. Turns out the smell was from the refrigerator. I was all for just sealing it up and tossing the whole thing out but Bob put on a face mask (actually a bandana) and cleaned it out. It was pretty nasty. I was in the back of the house and still gagging. Bob dumped every thing in a garbage can and even put the can on the curb. Think it will be picked up before we go home? LOL
I dumped clothes in a plastic container. Didn't really pay attention to what I grabbed, except every piece of underwear we own. Grabbed up a bunch of papers and a lot of my bead stuff. Maybe eventually I'll find time to make some bracelets and earrings.
As we were loading the vehicles a truck with guards stopped to see what we were up to. Several more passed by after but none stopped. I got pretty teary-eyed when we saw a troop of about 10 or 12 National Guards march by. We yelled "Thank you! and God Bless!" at them.
Bob's work van was fine. He sed someone tried to syphon but it has a anti-syphon device on it. It was almost empty anyway. He used one gas can and we loaded up and headed out. We first headed over to Broklyn Street looking for Jim and Berta. We wanted to give them the extra gas and water we had. No one around there so we headed to Bouny looking for Nathan. No one around there either. At that point we decided not to waste anymore time looking for anyone and headed out. Saw Dr. John on his way out, too.
We took the Expressway out of town and it was pretty clear sailing to Luling again except for a few long lights here and there.
Will continue later...