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.