What began as Paul and Robie's Excellent Adventure has turned into Journey to the Twilight Zone.

Paul Kunkel and Robie Waganfeald, of Toledo, Ohio, chums since childhood, were returning from a seven-week summer vacation Aug. 26, when they stopped in New Orleans for a night of revelry in the French Quarter.

A few too many drinks, a stumble and fall on Bourbon Street and the appearance of a dispute that the men say was overblown resulted in misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges against them and an overnight stay at the Orleans Parish Prison.

In normal times, Kunkel, 44, and Waganfeald, 39, would have paid fines totaling about $300 each the following morning -- a Saturday -- fetched their car from the French Quarter parking garage, retrieved their luggage from the Super 8 motel on nearby Interstate 10 and headed home.

But there was nothing normal about that weekend in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina was homing in on the city, causing mass evacuations that Saturday and Sunday. Along with everything else, the legal system shut down, leaving the men stranded in the prison.

They were joined by 7,000 other inmates -- 511 of whom were being held on misdemeanor charges like theirs, according to Louisiana Department of Corrections officials.

What followed, according to letters sent from Kunkel and Waganfeald to their families and friends and substantiated in part by authorities, has been a nearly four-week odyssey that shows no sign of ending.

When Katrina struck New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 29, Kunkel and Waganfeald were in separate cells and hadn't seen each other since their arrest the prior Friday night.

The brunt of the storm missed the city, but after a pair of levees were breached by the storm surge following the hurricane, New Orleans began flooding early Tuesday. Water reached the prison that day.

Kunkel, in a letter to a Toledo friend, Cynthia Meyers, said guards abandoned the prison on Sunday, leaving prisoners unattended and without food, drink or electricity for three days as flood waters slowly filled their cells.

"I thought I was going to die in that jail," Kunkel wrote. "I was locked down in a cell made for two, with five people [in it], no working toilet, no food and no protection. People were panicking, breaking windows, setting fires -- anything to try to get someone's attention from the outside. No one knew if we were forgotten.

"Three days later, they [authorities] cut the jail bars and let us out. The water was up to my chest. I was drinking that water for a day and a half. It was filthy and contaminated. But I did not know what else I could do. I wanted to live."

Corrections Department spokesman Pam Laborde said she was unaware of mass defections by Orleans jail guards. But she conceded that normal prisoner care ceased that weekend.

"I don't know when the meals and other services stopped," she said. "They might have gone without food or water a day or two or maybe three days." She said floodwater reached a depth of five feet on the prison's first floor.

Boats were used to move the 7,000 inmates -- Kunkel and Waganfeald among them -- to the Broad Street overpass, an effort that began on that Tuesday and ended 72 hours later, according to Laborde. "It was quite an accomplishment," she said.

In a letter to his father, Gerald, Robie Waganfeald recalled arriving at the overpass at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 31, where thousands of other prisoners were being guarded by National Guard troops.

"I sat in the sun from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. -- 10 hours -- [with] no water and with National Guardsmen threatening to shoot people," he wrote. "Some [prisoners] got hit with rubber bullets, others with pepper spray. It was the most humiliating, unjustifiable thing I've ever seen."

On the overpass, Waganfeald and Kunkel saw each other briefly but could not speak. Buses had arrived to take them to prisons elsewhere in the state.

Waganfeald, who wrote that his hands were bound with a nylon band, was moved to the Catahoula Corrections Center in Harrisonburg, a six-hour ride from New Orleans. His situation improved considerably in subsequent days, he told his father.

Kunkel, who said he developed an eye infection, was not as fortunate. He was taken to a fenced-in field at Elayne Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, where he was held for four days along with several thousand other prisoners, a number of them dangerous criminals serving hard time.

"We lived in 90-degree-plus sun with no protection from the elements," Kunkel wrote. "One day it poured, and the ground was all wet and muddy. We were given one blanket, and we were freezing at night. My right eye was still infected, and I can no longer see very well because my contacts had to be taken out. Inmates were stealing blankets, and convicts were armed with homemade knives. They were no sanitary facilities. It was like a concentration camp. I [was] very afraid."

Laborde said the field served as a staging point for transporting inmates to other prisons. She said she knew about the difficult conditions. "We tried to pass out blankets and [provide] them with as much shade as possible, but it was typical Louisiana [summer] weather," she said.

As for why Waganfeald was shipped directly to another facility, while Kunkel ended up in the staging area, Laborde said, "That probably was a matter of timing."

Around Sept. 5, Kunkel was transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he remained as of Thursday night. His eye infection had improved, but he was still without glasses. Medication for anxiety and stress were left behind at Kunkel's hotel. New medications were prescribed by a prison doctor, but Meyers, his Toledo friend, worried that they were more harmful than helpful.

Meyers has had a number of brief phone conversations with Kunkel, as has the senior Waganfeald with his son. They don't understand why the pair are still being held for a misdemeanor offense. They also wonder what happened to their car, their luggage, wallets and other belongings.

Kunkel was worried about keeping his job at Sodt Elementary School in Monroe County, where he is a special-education teacher.

Laborde said the corrections system had intended to release prisoners held for only misdemeanors starting Thursday, but that plan was stalled by looming Hurricane Rita, which caused the prison system to evacuate about 1,700 inmates from various southwest Louisiana prisons to other, already overcrowded facilities.

"We would love to clear the space, [but] we have to redirect our efforts," Laborde said. "I don't know how much more we can take."

Gerald Waganfeald and Cynthia Meyers said they felt the same way. "I think it's a God-awful shame. I'm heartbroken, and so is my family," the father said Wednesday afternoon, his voice cracking and eyes bleary from too many sleepless nights.

Meyers, exhausted from spending day after day on the phone to Louisiana prison officials to no avail, said she felt helpless and frustrated because no one seemed to care. She was also angry.

"[Paul and Robie] were part of a huge number of people who didn't do anything serious but were left to drown," she said. "The [pet] animals have been treated better than those inmates. It says to me that there is a total lack of compassion for these [people]."

In a letter to Meyers that she received Thursday, Kunkel wrote: "This is more horrible than words can describe. Please keep praying. That's all I have been able to do to keep my mind straight and focused."