Ike was a MoFo - Part 1

So, I thought I would write about my experience with the asshole that was Hurricane Ike.

Wednesday, Sept 10, 2008 - Found out that Seabrook, Tx was under a voluntary evacuation.

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 - Seabrook was upgraded to a mandatory evacuation. I left work around 12 pm. Around 2 pm, I started freaking out because there were no hotel rooms to be found in the city of Houston...it's hard to find accommodations for me, the mom, the sister, three nephews and two dogs. (We have always evacuated together, we won't have it any other way.) Mom called around 3 pm and told me that she booked 2 hotel rooms at a LaQuinta on I10 and Wilcrest. At 5 pm we had packed up our clothes and I grabbed several photo albums and the framed pictures I have of Nanny and Paw Paw...While I was packing the news kept talking about the 15-20 foot storm surge that would most likely hit the Clear Lake area and my apartment is right across the street from Clear Lake... there was a lot more crying after hearing this news. I go and meet the mother and the sister at their house and off we go to the LaQuinta. I will say, this evacuation process was not nearly as stressful as the Rita evacuation, when it took us 27 hours to get to Lufkin, TX...we refer to that one as Hell Drive 2005 or the 2005 Trail of Tears. Anyway, it took us about an hour and a half to get to our hotel. We checked in and sat on our hotel beds, eating pop tarts and watching the news. I wanted to change the channel, but I couldn't...it was like a train wreck, I couldn't look away.

Friday, September 12, 2008 - Woke up, turned on the news and saw Galveston flooding...this did not give me warm-fuzzies. All I could do was watch the news. We went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch and all I could think about is, "I wonder what Ike is doing now, I hope it made a hard turn to the right or left." Isn't that horrible, you don't ever want to wish anything bad on someone else, but I really didn't want Houston to get hit. Oh, I almost forgot, I got my paycheck on Thursday but by the time I got home there were no banks open, and sadly my company does not offer direct deposit yet. So, Friday, after lunch mom and I went to go find something open to get the kids some coloring books and quiet toys. While we were out, there was a Western Union place open, I went in and asked the man if he would please cash my check, once he saw my ID and noticed my address he cashed it with no questions asked, he didn't even call my employer. So, here's a big shout out to the Western Union on Gessner north of I10! After all that, we went back to the hotel to sit, wait and watch the news.

Saturday, September 13, 2008 - 12:30 am we lost power and decided to go down to my sister's room so we could all be together. (If something was going to happen to one of us, it was going to happen to all of us.) I think I slept maybe an hour the whole night. I have never heard winds like that. One of the only things that kept going through my head was, "Please don't let there be a tornado!!! After the winds died down, mom and I decided to go out to her car and listen to the radio. While I was sitting in her passenger seat, I looked to the left and said, "Oh no, Megan's passenger side back window got blown out." We went back in the room to let Megan know about her car. Then we walked back outside and a guy asked if we knew whose Mustang that was sitting there, when I told him it was mine he told me the bad news...My back window was gone. There was glass all on the inside and outside of my little car. When I walked over to the passenger side, that's when I realized what had happened. The little backseat window that's shaped like a triangle was shattered but hadn't fallen out of the window hole and right in the middle of the window was a little hole. Some douche bag with a pellet gun shot our windows out. And it wasn't just our windows, there were about 30 cars in the parking lot that didn't have windows. What kind of jackass uses car windows for target practice in the middle of a hurricane? Later that afternoon, I would say around 2ish, the manager of the hotel comes up to us and asks if there are any men staying with us. When we told him it was just us and the boys, he told us they were trying to get a group of people to watch the hotel, since there was no power and no security it might get dangerous at night. Well, me being worst-case scenario girl, the only thing I could think of was the hotel being under siege by rabid gang members and them raping a pillaging the entire complex. We survived the hurricane, now we had to deal with unsavories coming and tormenting us. My mom decided that we needed to go somewhere else. She got in her little car and drove west. About 45 minutes after she left, I got a voice mail that said, "Mandy, I found a hotel with electricity, you and Megan pack everything up." By the time she got back, the cars were packed and we were ready to go. We went 22 miles west of where we were to Brookshire, TX.

To be continued...

Until next time...

Mandy