Hurricane Ike - Part III - The Escape and the Return Home

We headed toward College Station with Paul manning the phone trying to find us a place to stay.  My sister and parents reserved the last two remaining rooms at the Hilton.  From the time we had a phone signal, around Cypress until we pulled in to College Station, Paul was on the phone.  We pulled into the HoJo on the south side of town, just to see if they happened to have a room.  The gentleman working the front desk handed Paul a list of local hotels with a "X" next to the hotels he knew had no vacancies.  Paul started at the top of the list, and I the bottom.  Paul made it to the Knights Inn, one of College Station's finer establishments, when they stated that they thought they might have a room.  Before the woman could get the words out of her mouth, Paul told her we would take it.  I literally think it was the last room in town.

Let's just say, the Knight's Inn, is not high on my list of hotels/motels in College Station, but I was never happier to have a shower and air conditioning.

The next day, I met up with 

my mother, sisters, Jodie and Emily, along with Andrew and Allissa and took a tour of Aggieland.  We started by walking around Kyle Field.  A nice gentleman offered to take us into the club level of the Zone so the kids could see the field.

Playing on the ramps on the first deck

Emily and Allissa

Andrew, Emily and Allisa peering at the field

The view from the Zone

Andrew and Allissa held Yell Practice outside of Kyle Field.  Both it was a ton of fun to say "Howdy" to each passing person.

Toward the end of the day, Paul and I packed up and headed to Central Texas to take refuge at his parent's house.  They graciously let us come a hide at their house for a week.  I sure am glad because as we continued to check Centerpoint's expected return of power to our area continued to get pushed back.

We returned to Houston Saturday, a week after the storm.  We still had no power, the food in the freezers and fridge that we had forgotten about was now rotting and had melted and leaked all over the kitchen floor.  Let's just say the smell was horrid.  It took us, including my fabulous brother-in-law, Randy, several hours of elbow grease,  clorox, soap, vinegar, and baking soda, along with almost two additional weeks (one without power and one with power) to get the smell out of the house.  Our fabulous pool guy pulled all of the pool furniture we threw in the pool in anticipation of the storm, along with all the debris out of the pool.    Late on Sunday afternoon, a man appeared in the downed tree in our backyard.

He told me, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."  Well, that's how I interpreted his spanlish.  For the next few hours, we sat in awe as his team of men methodically cleared the trees from the power lines and the ugly sheds in the neighbor's back yard.  When the last limb  was removed from the lines a cheer from the neighboring yards erupted.  We all knew that was the first step in reestablishing power.  Oh, I forgot to mention that our neighbors across the street had power for several days at this point.   Little did we know, that it would be another week before we had power.  Paul and I made a game out of coming home from work and trying to guess if we had power.  We would roll down the windows of the car as we turned in to the neighborhood to see if we could hear the hum of the generators our neighbors were running.  We never did get it right...  Call us optimists.  ;)

Paul Bunyan...  Where's Babe the Ox

We were very lucky, our families made it through the storm without injury or any real loss of property.    Please keep the people of the  Galveston area in your prayers as they have a long road ahead of them.