Last year, about two to three weeks before Katrina, my wife and I, along with the kids and my wife's parents, went to New Orleans for the weekend. We did the normal touristy type things, had a good time, and came back home. Little did we know what was going to happen in a few weeks.

This weekend my wife and kids and I returned. We wanted to visit the Aquarium for my youngest son's "Gotcha Day" (see below).

Driving into NO, you can still see quite a few visible signs of destruction, including two buildings that look as if they were in a war. I'm not kidding - the buildings had what seemed like impact holes from missiles. This was a bit out of town though. Getting closure to NO, you see quite a bit of damage in suburbs, although mostly it's knocked down fences and roof damage.

In the city itself the damage was mostly windows. This surprised me as I would have thought windows would be easy to fix. But there are quite a few buildings with lots of windows still knocked out.

Luckily the Aquarium is definitely back on it's feet, which is good to see since it lost so much of it's stock.

All in all - it was a good trip, but heartbreaking in ways as well.