The Arrival.

This is a day late, because there ain't no internet at the camp. :-( I'm sending this from a hotel lobby near the French Quarter, through some random wifi connection.

4:15am. The alarm goes off. Way too early. Shower, pack the last
few things, and head to the office. There, I meet Laurie and Jimmy,
and we carpool to the airport. After handing our luggage over, we
pass through security. Jimmy and Laurie get through fine, but as I
pass through, the buzzer goes off. I get the..."please
step over here and have a seat" treatment. Things go pretty smoothly, though. A couple of
waves with the wand and a quick pat down, and I'm through. I meet up
with Greg, and we find our gate.

Then, after a short delay due to a thunderstorm, our flight is ready, and we head out. We head for Dulles first,
then on to New Orleans. The flights were pretty uneventful, all told.
Once we got into Louis Armstrong airport, we waited around for a few
of our team mates. Among us, we only had one set of lost bags, and
one seriously delayed flight. Not too bad. Once we had most of the
team collected, we got our rental car arrangements taken care of.
This took much longer than expected, due to the fascinatingly baroque
checkout system of our rental agency.

We then headed in our two rented vans to the campsite. Which turned
out not to be where it was supposed to be. They've moved campsites
since the last Red Hat team was there. The new camp was just a few
miles down the road. We registered without any trouble, and got our
room assignment. The new camp is a grade school building that was
apparently flooded. All of the walls, floors, and ceilings have been
removed. It's down to metal girders and brick walls now. Teams are
putting up drywall and doing other construction tasks constantly.
Apparently this is only the second week this camp has been inhabited.
The 'tents' turned out to be rooms separated with blue tarp, with
about twelve cots per room. There's an air conditioner in each room,
but it's still pretty hot here. There's also no Internet access to
speak of, so...

After getting acclimated and exploring for a little bit, we went to
orientation, which was pretty uneventful. Lots of safety information
and a basic description of the procedure. The part that got everyone
excited was the snake identification section. Cottonmouths,
rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and copperheads, oh my! The woman who
was presenting said that she found at least one of these snakes in
each house she cleaned, so tomorrow should be eventful.

I'm not sure how frequently I'll have access to an Internet
connection, but when I do, I'll try to update here. We took some
pictures on the way in, but I haven't had a chance to upload them yet.
I'll try to do that soon.

We leave for our first house tomorrow morning at 8:30. No-one has
mentioned alligators yet, but I'll keep my eyes open...