Third and Fourth Leg

07-08 August 2017

The next day we were headed for a suburb of Houston where Heather's sister Holly lives. She and her husband Scott were kind enough to take in our circus troupe for a night in their lovely home, feeding us and plying us with Tequila.

Our fourth leg was from Houston to New Orleans. Here is where our travel plans broke down a little bit, for multiple reasons. First, the whole traveling with pets thing is a huge pain and really limits your options. Finding places that would take two dogs and two cats was difficult and expensive. Second, Chelsea and Travis wanted a little time to themselves in NO, so we were staying for a couple nights. I searched for AirBnBs near the airport and found a little place that would take the pets and wasn't outrageously expensive. Unfortunately I didn't pay too much attention to how near the airport it actually was, as in not. It was in a place I was previously unfamiliar with aptly called Center City.

When we pulled off the freeway near the dome and into the neighborhood we were greeted by 55-gal drums with cozy looking fires in them. We pulled down a side street following the GPS directions only to encounter a hole that spanned more than half of the road and almost as deep. No barriers, markings, cones or whatever. WTF? If we had pulled in during the pouring rain a few minutes earlier I might have driven right into it. The trailer wheels cleared it by less than a foot.

The 2-bedroom house was actually a nice little place with its own driveway and parking, but I didn't want to venture out on foot after dark, or for that matter, before dark. I was flashing back to an encounter while lost in Delaware a long time ago (pre-GPS) and episodes of The Wire. We talked about leaving, mostly because the trailer with Chelsea and Travis' every worldly belonging was going to have to be parked in the street for two days. I wasn't sure it would still be there, or at least still full, by the time we left.

I was tired after driving all day and maybe not thinking too clearly, but I got the idea of parking the trailer at the airport. On the drive there my head cleared a little and I envisioned how parking a clearly heavily loaded trailer at the airport might quickly attract another kind of unwanted attention. I decided to try the largest off-airport parking lot across the street. They either didn't notice or didn't care why a U-Haul trailer would be parked at the airport. Welcome to New Orleans.

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