And now we know

Today is Thursday, September 11th. We have now evacuated to San Antonio staying at a Residence Inn there (MUCH, MUCH better than last evacuation). How did we end up here? Well....

Last night we started the evening very carefully watching Ike. No evacuation orders had been given. We were going to play it by ear, but began getting the house ready for the storm - putting away everything outside, moving photos and important items upstairs - bagging them in plastic, moving things away from windows. This morning we woke up early about 7 a.m. to find that the storm had turned and mandatory evacuations were called for our area (they do it by zip code). The expected storm surge - if nothing changed as of that moment - would be 18 feet. We are in a storm surge area. Winds were expected at 100+ mph. So we woke the kids up and told them to pack their stuff and we were evacuating.

I am still waiting to see what clothes I actually brought - don't remember packing much. We did pack up items from the refrigerator and freezer to bring with us (kitchen here) along with other food and stuff the dog would need. We left our house around 8:45 a.m. anticipating a potentially long drive to San Antonio.

Fortunately everyone in Houston was abiding by the order to only be on freeways if you were ordered to evacuated. Everyone else is suppose to "hunker down". We only ran into a little bit a slowing and maintained full speed all the way in. On the way we saw many,many buses, ambulances, and taxis heading toward Houston to help with the evacuation for those who can't leave on their own. My prayers are with those anxious people right now.

We were blessed by having our hotel room ready though we arrived early. They even waived the fee for pets since we were evacuating. The staff here has been very accomodating for us. So now we have our computers hooked up to the wireless. Robert is watching the live video feed from www.khou.com and I am sending updates. As for the kids, two are playing Wii, one is watching TV and one is on the phone.

I will try to update to let you know how we're doing and what we've heard.