This is the latest post in a series on Ocean Springs, Miss. Scroll down for the others and click the photos for enlargements.

I pulled off to the side of the road as well as I could. Front Beach Drive is a bit narrow, nothing like the four-lane Beach Boulevard in Biloxi. It curves between the sandy beach and the properties to the north that usually are supported by four-foot walls.

Here is where I met Jean, an older woman who lives in a condo along this road. The first floor of her condo was severely damaged by Katrina. She said she would have much prefered her second floor be destroyed, because she’s an artist, and she did her paintings on the first floor.

Earlier in the week, she was able to pull one of her paintings from her condo’s wreckage, untouched by the storm. She hopes to find more.

Jean was walking along Front Beach Drive, “sightseeing” before her condo association meeting, at which they were to decided whether to rebuild the damaged condos.

I didn’t get a good photo of her condo, but Jean did tell me about some of the other properties on the beach.

The photo you see above is of a house built in 1918. It survived Camille in 1969, and it looks as though it will be able to be repaired after the damage wrought by Katrina.

The owners has been meticulously redecorating the house, room by room, to reflect its Victorian roots. Jean had taken a tour of the home last month.

“It was beautiful,” she said. “At least it was on August 28th.”

Katie, my colleague from Boise, wrote about this: “‘Steps to nowhere’ stand in mute memorial to Katrina’s power”

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — A set of brick stairs stands sentry over heartbreaking piles of wood, furniture, toys and china that just weeks ago made up Jeffrey and Angie Giddens’ gracefully aging beach cottage.

Read the story and see the photos.

This is the latest post in a series on Ocean Springs, Miss. Scroll down for the others.

It’s time for me to get some sleep, but I’ll leave you with a few photos taken on that beach in Ocean Springs.

Face one way, and you see the nature that draws people to the humid air of the gulf coast. Face the other way, and you see what destruction nature can hand to you in a single day.

Good night, and there will be more about Ocean Springs in the morning.

This is the latest post in a series on Ocean Springs, Miss. Scroll down for the others.

When I saw these few sticks in the sand near the bridge, I wondered if they were in fact the remains of some sort of structure.

They were.

This is what is left of the Ocean Springs Yacht Club. The sign begins:

“Welcome members and guests of the Ocean Springs Yacht Club. We are currently undergoing remodeling due to hurricane Katrina.”

By the way, that line of trees you see on the horizon of the top photo? That’s Deer Island in the gulf near Biloxi, one of the many barrier islands that line the coast.

Read “Welcome to Ocean Springs,” the introduction to these posts.

Hurricane Camille is the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s high-water mark: All other big storms are referenced and compared to the legendary Big One of 1969.

Remember the photos of antebellum homes smashed by Katrina? As bad as Camille was, they had survived. They did not survive Katrina.

I drove nervously past a couple of “Road Closed” signs on my way to the bridge and found I was not the only one paying a visit. Among the many people there was a recent widow — last year, she lost her husband of 41 years. She was a long-time resident of Ocean Springs and, although she wasn’t here for Camille, she knew something about the history of the bridge before us.

The new U.S. 90 bridge was built sometime in the ’50s, before Camille. The bridge is composed of multiple pillars with slabs of road pretty much only resting on the pillars.

The point is to protect the pillars from hurricane damage. In 1969, Camille knocked around some of the slabs on the bridge, but barges came along and simply pushed the slabs back into place for a relatively easy fix.

But the fix won’t be nearly so easy after Katrina. The Mississippi Department of Transportation is already soliciting bids for utter replacement of the bridge.

More photos of the U.S. 90 Biloxi bridge:

You can check out this awesome aerial photo and many other at this Sun Herald slide show.

You can also check out a few before-and-after satellite photos of this bridge, brought to you by Digital Globe.

If you find any other photos to link to, please leave the web page in the comments below.

And don’t forget my own photo that I posted earlier.

Image courtesy of Google Maps

Ocean Springs lies to the east of Biloxi, across what’s simply called the Back Bay of Biloxi. Biloxi is on a peninsula, so a bridge connects — or connected — Biloxi to Ocean Springs.

I got to Ocean Springs the only way you can — by going east on I-10, which is a few miles north of Biloxi, and coming south down Mississippi Route 609.

You can see U.S. 90 clearly on the satellite image above from Google Maps. U.S. 90 is the major road, the thickest one, that cuts across the top lefthand corner of the image.

But you can also see two other bridges just to the north of the U.S. 90 bridge. The one closest to the main U.S. 90 bridge is the old U.S. 90 bridge, which was left open for pedestrians for fishing. The top bridge is a railroad bridge.

Now, all three bridges have portions of them in the bay.

After driving up to the bridge and taking some pictures there, I drove east along the coast on what I later found out was Front Beach Drive. (Not many street signs survive.) I took photos there and followed the road around to the inlet you can see at the lower right.

Following are my photos, and the stories I found there.

The Google map of the coastline allows you to grab it and move it around, change the perspective from close-up to far off, and change from map view to satellite view.

I drove over to Ocean Springs, Miss., today before work and took plenty of photos and spoke with a few residents who were out and about, looking at the damage.

I’ll post some photos and stories later this evening.

This photo is of the bridge that connects Ocean Springs to Biloxi. You can see some of the hotels that the casinos built in the background.

Here is a map that shows you where Ocean Springs is in relations to Biloxi and Gulfport.

No real new reason to point you over to the web site of Pass Christian resident Jimmy Johnson. He’s the cartoonist behind my favorite strip, “Arlo and Janis.”

Last week, he posted some poignant photos from Pass Christian. If you missed them, please check them out.

But today, he posted a few comics from his archive, and I thought you might find them funny.

Also, check out his work on comics.com.