It’s 3:30am Monday morning, and I’m pulling into my driveway in Houston. For the past 21 hours I’ve been driving, errrr fleeing, from New Orleans. For those that may not know, the drive from New Orleans to Houston is normally about 5 hours. Yesterday it took 21 hours.
Lemme back up a second. Over a month ago my law firm made plans to take our summer clerks down to the Big Easy for one night. This was a small recruiting effort to persuade them to accept our pending job offers. Only 6 lawyers went with 7 summer clerks.
We landed in New Orleans on Saturday at 11:30am, and were only scheduled to stay for just over 24 hours. Our return flight was on Sunday at 4:30pm. I hadn’t been following Hurricane Katrina very much and wasn’t really aware of it’s magnitude, nor its path directed at us. Fortunately others were, and suggested that we rent 3 cars just to be on the safe side in case we needed to drive out of the city.
The Hurricane Gets Stronger While the Gambling Begins
After checking into the Windsor Court Hotel (which is the nicest hotel in town by the way), we go to Harrah’s located directly across the street. I play blackjack (approx. $25/hand) for 2-3 hours with the group, but am really itching to cash out and get over to the poker room. I hate blackjack and find it way too gut-wrenching. I don’t even enjoy it when I’m winning, and I’m perfectly content to not play a single hand during an entire weekend stay in Vegas. Nevertheless I know that if I run off to the poker table, I won’t see anyone and won’t be bonding with the clerks. I pay my dues for a few hours.
I walk away dead even after 3 hours and head to the poker room with McAndrew and one of our clerks. Harrah’s is spreading several games: $6-12 Limit, $10-$20 Limit, $2-$5 No Limit ($200 max buy-in), and $5-$10 No Limit ($200 minimum buy-in with no maximum). I buy into the $5-$10 No Limit game for $500. I play for 3.5 hours and don’t really get many decent cards. There is a lot of money on the table and the action is very good. I realize that in order to “make a move” on someone I’m going to have to risk my entire stack. So I decide that the better course is to just wait to get paid off with a big hand. I avoid marginal situations, but never really get much going.
Dinner is at 9:15pm, and I cash out down $70 at the poker tables. We eat at Emeril’s restaurant, and the food is fantastic. It was one of the finest meals I’ve eaten, and I suggest you try it if you haven’t already.
Meanwhile the storm has been upgraded to category 5, and is headed directly at us. People in the town are all discussing it, and many have already left. Even a few people in our group decide they want to drive back to Houston immediately after dinner. I call them chickens as they climb into their cars at 12:15am and head to Lake Charles and then Houston. Tye Hancock and I are real men. And real men stay and gamble. Who cares about a little rain, right? Wrong.
Tye and I are the only two remaining from our group, and it seems like the only two remaining in the French Quarter. The hotel is dead, and the casino traffic is very light. We head back to Harrah’s and play blackjack where I quickly win $200. He quickly loses and decides to go back to the hotel to get some sleep.
I cash out up $200 and head back to the poker room. I have to sit at a $6-$12 table while I wait, and I win another $188 before my seat at the $5-$10 NL game opens up. I buy-in for $500. The action was just as juicy as before. Two players had over $4,000 in front of them and 2-3 more had approx. $1,500, and several had $500. I was clearly short stacked, but ready to employ my same strategy of sitting and waiting in the weeds.
The cards weren’t too great, but I didn’t make many mistakes. I was scared of these guys and concentrated on playing as well as possible. I was able to win the hands I should’ve won, and get away from the hands I was losing. I had two very big hands. In the first one I turned two pair with A7 and got all my money in and won a $1,700 pot. About an hour later I got all my money in with KK against 77 and won the largest pot of my career, $4,400. I cashed out with a profit of $4,283 at the poker table. Total win for the weekend = $4,603.
About 6:15am, Harrah’s personnel announced they were closing the casino for the hurricane. I walked back to the hotel, showered, and threw my bag in the car. Tye and I were on the road at 6:45am. We mistakenly thought we wouldn’t hit too much traffic since we were leaving so early, and because the storm wasn’t due to hit until the following morning. How wrong we were.
It took us over 7 hours to drive only 50 miles, and another 14 hours to get the rest of the way home. It was incredible because the entire city was virtually under martial law. The mayor had ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city, and imposed a curfew of 6pm. They had also issued a FEMA directive that allowed government personnel to automatically commandeer any property or vehicle they deemed necessary for public use. It was clear that they weren’t messing around today.
It was also quite scary. I don’t know if any of you have seen “War of the Worlds” or the older movie “Deep Impact” but the freeways looked exactly like that. The cars weren’t moving, and people were outside just standing around on the freeway. Occasionally military helicopters, hummers, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles would blow past us. By this time, we could actually see the hurricane in the sky heading towards us. There was a gigantic wall of clouds from the horizon to the top of the sky. It was very ominous.
Also each and every gas station along the way home had a line of 10-20 cars waiting to fill up with gas. The AM radio stations were all commercial free and constantly directing everyone to leave. The Army Corps of Engineers predicted that New Orleans would be under 15-20 feet of water for several weeks. Power was going to be out citywide for over a month, and the city was going to be completely uninhabitable for at least 3 weeks. And if you waited until Sunday afternoon to try and head out of town, it was going to be too late.
After 12 hours we reached Baton Rouge (which is not very far from New Orleans). We decided to get off the freeway and head North to Alexandria before cutting back down. We moved pretty well on the back roads, but eventually hit the traffic again in Beaumont. I thought it would eventually thin out, but it never did. At 1am we were only 35 miles outside of Houston, and still sitting in stopped traffic. It was absolutely sick.
If I hadn’t won any money, the ride home would’ve been unbearable. Instead every time I started getting frustrated with the traffic, I just pulled out my wallet and counted the 51 hundred dollar bills (with a smile on my face).
