un - freakin' - believable!

hello all. you have probably seen the pictures of the houston evacuation, but i know i didn't really understand what those images meant. let me tell you. the drive from our house downtown houston to john paul's parent's house in dallas is normally exactly a 4 hour drive. we knew the evacuation would cause crazy traffic problems, so we were expecting an 8, maybe a 12 hour drive. we left home at 15 minutes past midnight. at 8 am, we had just arrived at the exit i normally take to work (a 15 minute drive). at noon, we had not yet reached the woodlands!! so, if you know houston, you understand. the mayor had told people to be prepared for very long drives in the evacuation, but how in the heck do you prepare for it to take over 12 hours to get out of city itself?

we had tried to sedate the cats with benadryl per the vet's instructions. it seemed to work fairly well for xochi, our super-hyper-freaked-out cat. usually in the car he makes the most terrifying noises, but he was quiet most of the time. zeugma, on the other hand, must have vomited up the pill at some point; he was not calm at all. for 11 hours (!!) he screamed one meow a second, every single second. around hour 7, john paul took him out of the carrier and tried holding him in his lap. but, after driving all night without sleep and still being essentially in the center of the city, john paul's nerves were shot. zeugma wouldn't calm down and relax and his squirming pushed john paul over the edge. back into the carrier zeug went. not like being out helped him much. by hour 9, zeugma's mews were weak and quiet, but still consistent. at hour 11 he seemed resigned to his fate and gave up complaining. although i worried he was dying, thank goodness he stopped. it allowed us to calm down and relax a bit at a critical point in the trip. still hardly any sleep, and inching through the woodlands, his incessant meowing would have driven us totally crazy.

the scene on the road was crazy. it was just like the fatal scenes in every disaster movie ever made: people walking around between cars; cars pulling other cars on ropes; cars overheating and breaking down all over; cars running out of gas; cars stopped on the shoulder with people sleeping in the open hatches or on the road next to the car; many people not using air conditioners, maybe to save on gas, sweating in the 100 degree heat. i've never seen anything like it.

the highway department said they were opening up the contra-flow lanes of i-45 at 9am, then they said it would be ready at 11am. when we got there (just north of the woodlands) about 1:30pm, it looked like it had just opened up. but it made a HUGE difference. finally we were able to drive almost at 30 mph. for the whole trip, we averaged 12 mph. most of the night hours we were at 1, or in a good hour 2, mph.

i'm totally ready to move to a city with a smaller population, far away from hurricane strike zones. i have a feeling these kinds of situations are going to keep happening. jp's mom saw a nasa weather scientist saying that we'll see active hurricane seasons with extremely strong storms for at least the next 10 years. welcome to the consequences of global warming!