I have not told you everything about our trip to New Orleans.
There were a few incidents we kept secret until they careened to their final conclusion. So far we’ve been lucky, so I feel obliged to share them.
There was a brief but terrifying moment when our hotel lost our rented minivan. It was funny until the third time the valet, who I’d dealt with each day for a week, returned, sans van, and said: “Are you sure it’s a black Chrysler?”
“Yes,” I insisted. “Same one I had yesterday and the day before.”
Luckily the van reappeared and I was spared the awful prospect of making a call back to Tribune headquarters to explain how a perfectly good, $20,000 minivan vanished in the Big Easy.
See, I got into a small bit of trouble four months ago when we covered the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There was, let’s just call it an episode, that I am no longer allowed to discuss that involved a downed power line and the liberation of an air conditioning unit from the roof of our rental RV.
So losing a minivan would get me a one-way ticket to a weekly newspaper in North Dakota.
Fortunately, photographer Kathy Moore provided the best mishap of the trip – so far.
Moore is a maniac about making sure her computer and camera gear are locked in a hotel safe when she’s not working. The logistics of neatly stuffing several thousand dollars of gear in the tiny safe takes no less than two hours (a few minutes, really). Whenever I suggested that maybe the safe was a waste of time, she got a crazy, wild-eyed look. Moore, who seems to think the entire city of New Orleans was waiting to nab her gear, would say things like: “I’d rather keep my job” or “I’d rather not have that talk with by boss,” Secretly, she relished the idea of buying lots of shiny new gear on the company dime.
So it was with great delight that Moore informed me after lunch one day that the safe would not open. She typed in her code, the machine groaned, but remained locked. She tried the code again. Nothing. She tried it several more times. Nothing. So there I was happily working on my laptop, drinking in the irony that my computer was safe while Moore’s gear was in vaulted limbo.
“Better call security,” I said without looking up from my laptop. “I need to get going.”

I smiled privately when the security guys failed to open the safe using their little hand held computer.
“Blasting caps” I recommended, the best solution I could remember from 1980s television action shows. These guys looked up for blasting caps.
“It might come to that,” one joked, causing Moore great unease.
Instead, they retrieved a massive drill and went to work on the door of the safe.
“Ever break anything when you’re doing this?” I asked, hopeful.
“Not yet” he said, pushing hard on the drill.
The first hole didn’t open the safe like they had thought.
“That usually does it,” he said. “That’s strange.”
Moore looked concerned, and started planning the call to her boss.
The guys drilled another hole, and that time, success.
Moore made sure the gear was unharmed while the guys attached a new door, with another finicky code system.
The next day Moore locked her gear in the safe again.
My hope was restored.