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Evacuation

I finally got the Internet connected and my laptop working. Even though Gustav was almost three weeks ago now, and I should really be planning for tomorrow, I figured I would reacquaint myself with my blog and finally post about evacuating.

As mentioned earlier, we had to move to a new apartment before we could evacuate. Luckily, there were enough people around to help us out. We thought about leaving in the middle of the night on Saturday/Sunday, but decided that we all just needed a really good night's sleep. Here's the new house. We have the top floor.

The night before we evacuated was lovely. It didn't feel like a hurricane was coming.

We had no idea what to expect. It seems silly now, since Gustav was definitely not the "mother of all storms" and Ike created so much more havoc in Texas. But at the time, the media was telling us all sorts of things, and I had panicked family members calling and telling us we had to get out. During Katrina, people had spent 15-16 hours on the highway, so we were settling in for the long haul. We had six gallons of water and whatever food we could find (there wasn't much because of the moving and all of the grocery stores and fast food restaurants had closed up shop already - I couldn't even buy gum at a gas station where we stopped so Amanda could plead with the owner to allow a pregnant lady to use the bathroom). We dropped my car off at the church because the ground is higher and it had a locked gate that we could close up.

And then headed out on the road. A lot of houses had boarded up their windows, although not as many as I had expected.

There were definitely more businesses boarded up. There was no one around on the morning we evacuated. Just police cars cruising the streets.

There were tons of buses lined up, waiting for further evacuations.

We decided to take the back roads up towards Baton Rouge. We were headed to a large Mormon church in Jackson, Mississippi. Normally Jackson is only about 3 hours away. But, like I said, we weren't sure what traffic would be like and everyone kept telling us that we had to avoid the contraflow at all costs. So the back roads. And it worked really well. We hardly saw any traffic.

I kept Pete entertained with my Nintendo. He doesn't know how to work it yet, really, so I would just start him at the beginning of Mario 64 where he could make Mario run around and listen to the birds. We stopped in Fayette, MS for lunch. We had basically thrown an assortment of random food into a big garbage sac before we left, so for lunch we stopped at a little park and pulled out our garbage sac. As we prepared a meal from its contents, a man stopped and asked us if we needed a place to stay. I guess we did look a little homeless.

Our scenic route took us on a part of the Natchez Trace Parkway, so I got all excited about byways. It was lovely.

We finally made it to Jackson, six hours later. We didn't know what to expect at the church. We had images of cots lined up in the cultural hall with screaming children running around at all hours. It was much better than that. They assigned us a classroom, so we had some privacy. Later, some members in the area brought us some airbeds.

It was pretty nice. We even had a shower. Of course, we had to share it with about 50 other women, so lines were long, but hey, a shower. So what did we do whilst evacuated? Basically sat around the church a lot. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and played Nintendo. Peter played with basketballs in the gym and would wake up in the morning saying "ball." It's all he wanted to do.

And we played an awesome boardgame called Ticket to Ride. One day we ventured in to the town (we were actually in a suburb of Jackson, called Clinton) and found a park for Peter. It was a little rainy, but it was so nice to be out of the church that we didn't mind. And it was a really cool park.

The trees were even painted with cute characters and kid-inspired themes, which was really cute, except for this smurf.

A little creepy. Other than our adventure at the park and an unsuccessful attempt to find the mall in Jackson, we didn't do much. Except for a short trip here:

But that will have to wait for another day.