Granbury

So Colin and I have been spending our Gustav evacuation vacation in Granbury Texas. This is a small town outside of Fort Worth. We have been quite lucky in our evacuation location, because we have been enormously well treated by our host, Ken. Even though there are 12 of us sleeping in a three bedroom house, we still have managed not to go completely mad.

We are staying in what might be the strangest gated community I have ever seen. It is called Pecan Plantation. It has the following ridiculous amenities: a golf course, a marina, an EMS/Fire fighting service, a pool, a tennis court, and a bi-plane airport. I had no idea they even made gated communities with airports! Perhaps what is oddest of all about this is that most of the houses in the community are not overly lavish, and are of footage less than or equal to what we have in New Orleans.

Mostly we have been cooking and sleeping. All of us are recovering from the stresses of evacuation and worrying about our city and our lives. Luckily, New Orleans was spared from the majority of storm damage. We received a text message earlier in the week from the only neighbor who stayed in our block, (his wife works for the Times Picayune, and was covering the storm) that our house was not flooded and did not have major damage. We are quite relived by this, but we could still have interior damage.

We did manage to go to Dinosaur Valley State Park this afternoon though, which we were all really happy to have done. The weather was wonderful, and the dinosaur tracks were easily visible in the limestone of the riverbed. Near one set of tracks there was an awesome swimming hole, and we all took a dip in the beautiful water.

Colin wading.

Erin, David and I in the water.


Limestone riverbeds.

Evacuation photos

We evacuated to Texas on Sunday morning. We took route 10 to Baton rouge, then route 49 to Shreveport and finally route 20 to Fort Worth. The drive itself was not too bad, we were lucky to have Mame and the cats for company.

The cats were real troopers. They mostly slept all day, with occasional bouts of meowing and activity. Later on, Hodag got more active. (I think the lights visible from the freeway excited him.)

Hodag checks out the lights shining onto the freeway from a Texas Wallmart.

Mame, Colin and I made it to the Texas border! Amusingly, almost all of the license plates of the vehicles in the border rest stop were Louisiana plates. Also present were stickers for the radio stations WWNO and WWOZ , as well as from colleges such as Xavier and Loyola.

The day before evacuation

Before we left due to Gustav we took some pictures (on Saturday of last week). This was while Mame was in town visiting, so we were trying to do some touristy things. Sadly, we gave up about midday to return to the house to make final hurricane preparations.

We took Mame to the french quarter for breakfast on Saturday, while we were there we saw some advance National Guard troops getting coffee.

Mame also enjoyed the coffee and the beignets available from Cafe du Monde. The rest of the French quarter was really deserted though, since everyone had already begun to evacuate. (Even the Mules were absent from Jackson square.)

later that day we worked on boarding up the house.

The result of our hard work, all shutters locked and windows boarded up.

Evactuated

A few notes to let everyone know that we're safe.

1. We left home at 8:00 am yesterday morning. "We" means both of us, Mame, and the two cats. Getting out of the city was very easy, thanks to the contra-flow. We ran into some traffic congestion just north of Opelousas, at a point where they were converging four lanes of traffic into two. That delayed us a bit, but then it was clear sailing again until we got to Texas. Mame has another friend in Dallas, so we met him for dinner and dropped her off with him. We ran into some more traffic in Texas, and got lost around Fort Worth trying to find the road to the house. We arrived just before midnight.

2. CNN is running a story about storm surge overtopping levees. As best we can tell from here, it's not nearly as bad as it might sound. It's at the Industrial Canal, which seems to be holding okay. The fact that it's overtopping instead of breaching means that not very much water is actually getting onto the wrong side of the levee. There isn't much we've seen or heard about our part of the city, except that campus looks fine. Gustav is continuing to pass us by and weaken, so it looks like we're going to be okay.

3. We are currently at the house of the father of a friend of mine from the Physics Department. There's a lot of physics grad students here with us, and we're actually quite comfortable. Tulane has canceled classes this week, and we hope to be back later this week or by the weekend. Hannah and Ike willing, of course.

Gustav

Its cool. We have boarded stuff up and are evacuating tomorrow morning or late tonight. We will be safe. We think we know where we are going, but if the storm changes direction, we have multiple options. We boarded up the house earlier today.

The cats are going with us, as is Mame, who is visiting us this weekend. She will either fly out tomorrow morning or we will evacuate her with us.

We are all OK for now. More in-depth posts to follow on our situation

Classes

Classes for the fall 2008 semester started yesterday. despite the official start of school, I feel woefully unprepared for classes. I am feeling pretty exhausted from the move and the strain of establishing a new house. I don't really feel capable of learning when I am still hunting for clean underwear among boxes every morning. Also, I have yet to find most of my school supplies, so that is also adding to my feeling of unpreparedness.

I am planning on taking fewer classes this semester, so I can spend any extra time establishing the new house and applying to graduate school for my PHD. Classes I am taking this semester are:

Epidemiologic methods II
Wednesday afternoons, 2:30-5:15

Intermediate biostatistics,
Wednesday and Friday 1:00-2:15

Infectious disease outbreak epidemiology,
Tuesday and Thursday 10:30- 11:45

Parasitology seminar,
Monday 10:00-11:45

Hopefully this light load (only 10 hours of classes) will let me continue to be useful in repairing and organizing the house.

Recommended for this Week

Recommended radio listening for this week: WWOZ is broadcasting live from Denver. Several New Orleans musicians are playing at and around the Democratic National Convention, and WWOZ decided to broadcast them back home. WWOZ will also be in the Twin Cities next week for a similar event at the Republican National Convention.

More information at WWOZ's blog. For folks outside New Orleans, WWOZ provides several webfeeds.

It's recommended because they just had Soul Rebels Brass Band performing with the Wild Tchoupitoulas, accompanied by a good description of what Mardi Gras Indians actually are.