Party of Five

So, we made it home, and we were pleasantly surprised by our house. Everything was in pretty good shape, even the inside did not have water inside of it somewhere that our friends couldn't see. The fridge wasn't even totally thawed. There was a huge tree laying across the road in our street, the neighbors already had a chain saw and were taking matters into their own hands cutting it up and clearing it. That tree blocked the storm drain on the street during the storm and threatened to flood the neighbors house, but the entire street came together and were bucketing water out of the yard (in the middle of the hurricane) into the drain and saved the house from flooding. People are really coming together, it is great. The whole street was out cleaning and clearing, helping each other out. It is pretty funny though, we brought some coffee and ice for our neighbors and there was a little hoarding going on, people got the stuff and ran it into their house and didn't tell anyone they had whatever it was that we gave them. The other neighbor was walking around siphoning gas out of peoples cars (with permission) to keep his generator going. We all pooled our thawing food and had a huge block party bar-b-cue last night. Once we ate, we headed to Dallas to for stop number 2 on our hurrication. We have no power, and even though we are going to have unseasonably cool 85 degree days and 65 degree nights, the boys were pretty freaked out by not having power. The electric company is estimating 2-4 weeks for power. That is a long time. So we know we can't stay there. It was funny because we were more in the dark (no pun intended) about what was going on in town once we were there. There are no tvs, cell phones don't really work, so no one had any information. We couldn't even get in touch with friends who we know are just a couple miles down the street. It was all very surreal. We were to Corsicana last night about 200 miles from the coast before we saw reliable power. Before then, we only saw a few little pockets of electricity here and there.

So, we are safe, and we will post pictures when we can.