Calm before the storm

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Calm before the storm... Current mood: exhausted ...sort of. I guess you could call us calm. We're too fucking tired to be anything else. It's about 10 minutes to 4pm on Sunday. We've been up for the better part of 2 days prepping for Gustav. The house is as secure as we can make it. Gas is turned off, and everything is unplugged. We started this morning at 2am after about 90 minutes of sleep. Fitfull sleep. Too nervous to sleep, really. We were supposed to leave at 3am, but we ran into a few technical difficulties, and I had to check the locks 3 times, even though I knew I locked them the first time. OCD is a bitch. So anyway, 3:23am was the official departure time. Under normal circumstances it is exactly 180 miles from my front door to the hotel parking lot in Jackson, MS. 3 hours with light traffic. When we evac'd for Katrina, it was a 3.5 hour trip, and that included stopping to feed the 5 month old baby. Not bad considering. the key was we left at 4am, and Contraflow had been implemented for hours at that point. This time, Contraflow didn't start until 4am, and we were to be one of the first to try it out. Bad timing. Overall it took us 6 hours plus or minus a few minutes (we're still kinda fuzzy on what day it is) which still isn't that bad considering some folks have been on the highway for 12 hours or more. Their problem is they are trying to use the major highways to get wherever they are going. I learned a long time ago that you need to have a Louisiana Atlas in your vehicle (or a really cool NAV unit). Fuck traffic. I'll drive 100 miles extra to get where I'm going as opposed to taking a clogged highway to get to point b. The people in the New Orleans area are just married to I-10. We used secondary roads whenever possible, and didn't have many slowdowns. I-55N turned into bumper to bumper for about an hour right before contraflow started, and at that point we covered 5 miles in 1 hour. Again after the end of contraflow, we did another 5 miles in 1 hour, but the remaining 4 hours (including potty breaks) were at times wide open. According to the Tundra, we averaged a speed of 27.9 mph, and I averaged 16.4 mpg on half a tank. Pretty damn impressive for a 6000+ truck loaded down with everything I could fit in it including a big-ass dog and 20 gallons of extra fuel (fuck running out of gas. Be prepared, people. It's the motto of the Boy Scouts). All in all, it's not bad considering all that we've had to battle against just to get here. I've been battling the flu since friday, and functioning in the heat on an empty stomach can get rough. I took more naps than Sean did. I had to. The fever had me on my ass. The hotel where we're staying is the same one we've evac'd to for Ivan in '04 and Katrina in '05. It was kinda dumpy in '04, very dumpy in '05, and an absolute dump in '08. BUT...it's got a bed, relatively cold AC, and a toilet that flushes. The rest are all details. The cats are finally coming out from under the bed. Mac (dog) finally took a shit. Everyone has pooped, so I can rest now. Not really. I can't nap. I'm past the point of short sleep being beneficial, so I need to just stick it out until bed time. The mets are cautiously downgrading Gus...so there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. However, Gustav hasn't been very predictable since Haiti, though, so I won't believe anything until the sonofabitch makes landfall, and I get word that my house is dry. Fingers crossed...