Well, I'm back to the grind and things are fairly normal for me, but I am one of the lucky ones. We safely made it to Austin on Thursday evening. It took us about 6.5 hours, which compared to some people's nightmare trips, was nothing. I took us through the back roads of southeast Texas and it worked out well for us. Luckily we live on the northside of Houston so we didn't have to come through all the bad traffic and we didn't have to get on any major freeway until we got to Austin.
It took my MIL 9.5 hours to get from her house to our house which is normally a 1 hour drive. She left her house at 1 in the morning too, but that didn't help. My parents went to Shreveport, we have family there, to ride out the storm. It took them 17 hours to get there (it's normally a 4-5 hour drive). And unlucky for them, Rita passed right over Shreveport at some point. They got a lot of rain, but other than that are okay.
Granted, my experience was a pretty good one so I am probably not a good cross section, but I think the state and local officials did a pretty good job with the evacuation. There really is no good way to evacuate 3 million people. The main problem really is the gas shortage. We still don't have gas at any station near our house, but right now I am okay on gas.
I'm so glad that all of my family and friends made it through this storm safe. My heart goes out to those in East Texas and Western Louisiana who were not so lucky. I'm sorry for their losses.
Thank you to everyone who had good wishes for me and my family. We did come home to find our two pear trees from our front yard laying mostly in the street. We lost one completely it looks like, but the other one may be salvagable. It will look funny without it's twin though. All in all not too bad. The winds were still strong when we got home on Saturday, but other than that we have had hot, humid weather, with heat indexes of 112 possible today. Fun stuff.
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