I read about every news story I could find coming out of New Orleans in the weeks leading up to the trip.
I looked at countless photos and saw numerous television reports from the area.

Video of Levee Breach

Nothing came close to conveying the devastation and bizarrely baron landscape we experienced driving around the Lower 9th Ward and other ravaged areas on Christmas day. We drove for hours, combing neighborhoods, often going an entire hour without seeing another moving car. The only cars we did see were filled with gawkers, usually nicely dressed for the holiday and driving around in sports sedans or SUVs taking pictures of each other next to debris.
We met a law enforcement officer flown in from Seattle parked under what had been the largest levee breach to ensure gawking didn’t turn into looting. He’d been in New Orleans three weeks and still had trouble getting his mind around the devastation.
“From here, you can drive 30 miles and it’s all the same thing,” he told us.
We decided to take him up on the challenge, driving a main thoroughfare into the bayou. We made it 22 miles before the road washed out into some bayou river.
Countless neighborhoods seemed stuck in some grim, freeze-frame since the waters rose and receded. A few FEMA trailers sat in yards, but many neighborhoods were entirely vacated.
We saw just three businesses that appeared to be open, a strip club, a bar and a beauty salon. Only the strip club and the bar were open Christmas.
We drove back to our hotel in the French Quarter, the only area in the city we’ve found with an even remote sense of normalcy, and marveled at the strange contrast between the destruction we had seen and the boozy merriment on Bourbon Street.