Louisiana: "Noo-Aw-Lins"

Blues, soul food, southern hospitality, a beautiful skyline: New Orleans! And here I thought the whole city was wiped off the map from Katrina only to find out that it's very much alive and kicking southern butt!

Our drive from Arlington, TX to New Orleans took about 10 hours plus stops. We left TX at 8:00am and arrived just in the nick of time at Jerry LaBella's auto shop for our 7:30pm presentations.

Jerry and Keith had seats set up and an audience waiting, a table with gadgets for folks to look at, and a whole bunch of yummy sandwiches from a local deli for all to eat. Jerry offered us cold beers, which we respectfully declined as we had 13 more hours of driving to do before we are done for the "day".

The laid-back do-it-yourself crowd was very receptive with lots of questions about marketing and of course technical issues. After the presentation and talk about the new Membership, we looked at the cars and hung around for about an hour.

A specail note: my beautiful fiance', Chelsea is back home running the office and working like mad on the website and coordinating our trip with Shannon and Sean. I want to thank them all for being so awesome! Also Crena for running our phones and pushing the crusade and Vanessa for helping our members in this critical time. We have such a great team!

Okay, enough mushy stuff! Chelsea's brother's girlfriend, Misty is from "Noo-Aw-Lins" and invited her cousin, Jerry down. Jerry and I spoke and he'll be getting involved too. I got to learn from Jerry about the craziness that ensued after Katrina and how he defended his house from would-be looters. Sounds like quite an adventure! He wanted to show Ozzie and I the city, but we had to hit the road en route to Clearwater, FL.

We are now driving along a very, very dark highway as I type this. It's after midnight and we're somewhere in Mississippi. Never been here before! Too bad I can't see anything. Oh well, this is business, not pleasure, right? Wrong! I love my "job"...... --Ari