September 12th - Hurricane Ike

So for anyone worried about the Baccus Family, we are not in Houston. Yesterday morning, I looked at the most recent predicted paths for Hurricane Ike and then I went into the living room, sat next to Ronny and calmly said, "I think we need to run for our lives." So we spent the morning getting ready. Ronny packed as much of our outside toys into the garage with the grill and the cars. I did laundry because we might lose power. Partway through the morning, they announced on the news that we were in a mandatory evacuation zone. We packed up our photo albums, cameras, computers, hard drives, important documents and 5-days worth of stuff for all of us. Then around 1pm we headed for Austin to stay with the Baccus-Hope family. We owe them so much for taking us in. We have almost completely overrun their small space. The four of them are in one bedroom and the four of us are in the other bedroom.

We made the same evacuation about 3 years ago for Hurricane Rita, which ended up hitting east of Houston in the Beaumont area. The evacuation was a mess. It was only a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and after seeing the destruction and lives lost, Houstonians didn't want to take any chances so EVERYONE tried to evacuate at the same time. It took us almost 20 hours to make the trip to Austin, which should have taken about 3.5 hours. It was insane.

Jack was about 11-months old, then. We left after dark thinking that Jack could sleep through the drive. Little did we know that we wouldn't make it to Austin until 3:30pm the next day. Every so often Jack would wake up crying, so I would crawl into our crowded backseat and take him out of his car seat and hold him for a bit. We were only moving about 2 mph, so I figured he wasn't at any risk, but it still felt weird taking him out of his car seat with the car in motion. Apparently during Hurricane Rita, our neighborhood never lost power and I'm not sure if we even got any rain. There were some branches down, but it was nothing serious.

So here we are, in Austin, all four kids are in bed, and we are watching the hurricane show on TV - mostly on the Weather Channel. They seem to be expecting some pretty scary things - storm surge up to 30 feet (a storm tsunami, they say), up to 1 million people without power, 100,000 homes flood-damaged. They are even expecting tropical winds in Austin, so we could lose power here tomorrow as well. We went out shopping to get some supplies like flashlights at Target and the lanterns (in camping) and flashlights (in hardware) were pretty well cleaned out. They had some $30 LED flashlights, but that was a bit more than I wanted to spend. So I checked out the Halloween department and sure enough, there were orange and black flashlights including batteries - 2 for $4. Now that's better.

The weather here is still nice. We'll see how it all plays out. Say a little prayer for us please.