September 15th - Ike Status

We are home. We have power. We have water.

Yesterday we had hopes of returning home and at least checking out our house. We said our goodbyes to Leslie, Daniel, Camilla, and Violet and headed to New Ulm, Texas to see Nana and Papa. New Ulm is about halfway between Austin and where we live in Houston. Our plan was to leave the kids with Nana and Papa and go check on the house. We knew that we didn't have power yet, so we had already planned to spend the night at Nana and Papa's house. We got on the state highway to get to I-10 and about 5 miles away from I-10 we got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. That wasn't part of our plan. Eventually we turned around and went back to spend a nice evening with Nana, Papa, and Melanie.

Right before we went to bed, I got a text message from my neighbor that the power was back on. Yippee! We slept well knowing that we were headed home in the morning to a house with power. Or so we thought. We got another text around 8am saying that our neighbor had power, but we did not. We decided to head home anyway with the hopes that our power would be on by the time we got here.

The drive was fine - not too much traffic. On our way into Houston, we started to see signs blown out, telephone lines leaning over, tree limbs down, and billboards down. As we got further into town, we started seeing some blown out windows on a couple of buildings and neighborhoods with lots of damaged roofs and fences. We would drive by grocery stores and gas stations. The parking lots would be PACKED with a line of cars waiting to get in. We have a full tank of gas, so that won't be a problem for us. I'm not sure when we will need to go grocery shopping again. Hopefully the lines will be down by the time we need anything.

We only saw one operational stoplight during our journey through Houston. Some were missing or hanging by a thread. Most cars were good at treating it as a 4-way stop, but not all. On our way to our neighborhood, we saw lots of downed trees on the main road, but our neighborhood and our street in particular seem to have fared well. Our house is fine other than a gutter that fell down and several sections of fence that are down. Our kids plastic play house was by the back fence that is knocked down and I found most of it in a drainage ditch behind the house. I'm not sure if it is recoverable.

The water from the ice machine leaked onto the floor and some water came under the front door, but that's all I've seen so far inside.

The kids have been happy throughout this whole ordeal - especially when we were staying with Camilla and Violet. When we left Camilla told Ronny, "I'm going to miss you." Ronny said, "I'm going to miss you too." Camilla responded, "I'm going to miss Jack more." Ronny was OK with that.

I hope to catch up on posting pictures soon, but I thought it was most important to get this information out in case anyone was concerned. All is well in the Baccus household. :) Thanks for all of the thoughts and prayers!