ike = good times!

so today, after spending the past year convincing all family & friends that "no one from our neighborhood ever leaves because of a hurricane!", we evacuated! this is how it happened...

thursday
3pm - clint comes home from work early b/c of all of the people from the coast evacuating. we feel sorry for those people & are sure they wish they lived where we do (since we never have to evacuate!)

4pm - clint goes for a run w/ hudson. i turn on the news & start getting a little worried as i noticed all the school districts around us, & even north were closing.

4:45pm - clint comes home & two jaws drop when we see that ike could be a cat 3 when it goes over our house! i go to talk with our neighbors who've lived here for 35 yrs. they say ike looks a lot like alicia from '84 where they lost power for 4 days. i freak.

5pm - we decide that if we leave we'll go early in the morning (per our neighbor's advice) because the roads are already gridlocked with people from the coast.

5:15pm - we join the masses @ heb. we wandered the aisles thinking what the heck we'd feed ourselves & hudson with no elecricity, further making up my mind that i wanted to leave!

5:30pm - we stop to fill up - had to get premium b/c they were out of regular! good thing we only needed a little.

6pm - we come home, feed hud & i start packing food & things we'd need for hudson if we were to leave. we're glued to the tv.

10pm - the national weather service updates on ike & says it's looking more like a cat 2 when it hits. it's looking a lot less severe. clint is feeling better about staying. i still don't like the sound of 60-75mph winds. the roads are still unbelievable gridlocked.

10:30pm - we go to bed just in case we'll have to evacuate & decide to get up @ 5am to check.

zzzzzzzz (neither of us really sleep well. all i can think/dream of is "i'm already kind of hot, how in the world will i sleep with out a/c???!)

friday
5am - clint gets up to make sure we don't need to evacuate & sees that suddenly they're predicting ike to hit the coast @ 110mph & are reminding us that alicia hit @ 115. all we have to hear is "alicia" & we're out. the harps aren't down with power outages! we frantically pack.

6:15am - harps hit the road for the big d. the roads were clear & we made great time - we feel so fortunate.

so, here we are in dallas & we're making the best of it! thanks to the haney's for letting us crash the guest bedroom of their new house! they actually live really close to where our first house was, so we're feeling a bit of deja vu.

we ate lunch @ our favorite chickfila & visited clint's old office, which is like visiting family. we're seeing the ogdens later & hopefully more folks.

so the moral of this story is that if you have to evacuate, make a fun weekend out of it!