Bye Bye Ike

Being the weather weenie that I am, of course I was glued to the models yesterday projecting where Hurricane Ike will go and how strong it will become. What I didn't like to see was that the track was getting closer and closer to the Houston area. Bob and I briefly talked about whether we should evacuate last night, but decided to see how things were going this morning before making a final decision.

Unfortunately, things didn't look much better this morning. After chatting with my dad for a while about what things were like around the Houston area after Alicia (a Cat 3 hurricane) came through back in 1983 (I was 3 at the time and couldn't remember), we decided the possibility of going at least a few days without power sounded positively miserable for a 20-month-old and almost 32-week pregnant woman with the achy joints of an 80-year-old. In fact, it's pretty miserable down here for anyone without A/C for an extended period of time.

So with that in mind, I began to run (or waddle) around getting ready to head to Austin as early as possible to stay with some friends for a few days. We remembered seeing the awful traffic jams that occurred on Houston highways when Rita was threatening to move in, and certainly didn't want to find ourselves stuck on the highway for hours on end not moving anywhere. Luckily 290 traffic was moving pretty good when we left around 12:30 this afternoon, but we both remarked that we were glad we left as early as we did. I suspect rush hour traffic was downright awful as people left town once their kids got out of school.

We're not sure exactly what we'll return home to, probably a lot of downed tree limbs and hopefully not too much in the way of damage to the houses in our neighborhood. Unfortunately the current projected track takes the center of storm just about right over our house, which could mean some very strong sustained winds...not good! On the one hand I'm just the teeniest bit bummed that we left, because I do find all types of severe weather fascinating, but I think the high wind would get old in about 10 minutes as soon as our power went out, so it's best we left.