Hurricane IKE!

Street alongside our neighborhood park. 
So many trees were down that you could barely recognize the park that Caroline plays at almost everyday.
Exiting our neighborhod. THe entrance had a big tree down, as well.

First of all, we are all ok! We had no damage to our house or ourselves! Hurricane Ike was definitely an adventure and still remains one now. 

Starting Friday night at about 2am the winds really picked up. It started getting pretty scary around 3:30am when we all went into the laundry room (which earlier in the day we warned Caroline that would happen & she referred to it as a "hurricane party"). We lost power at about 6:10am. We stayed in there until about 6:30am. WHen we came out it was still pouring rain and the winds were still pretty strong, but not like they were earlier. As far as we could tell there was no damage to our house. By about 11:30am, when it wasn't raining quite as hard, Brett went outside to see if there was any damage. We were very lucky not to have any trees down on our property. However, much of the neighborhood had many, many trees down. Our park was almost recognizable, there were so many trees that had fallen there. Some houses had trees leaning up against them or across their porches, but it didn't seem that any had caused major damage to any houses in our neighborhood. We did still have our land line though, thank goodness, but cell service was very bad and even trying to send a text to anyone was almost impossible. 

By Sunday, we were able to get in the car and see what the rest of our town looked like. THere were so many trees down, we couldn't believe it. We heard that two grocery stores were open, but none had ice, water, meat, milk or batteries. The lines were 100s of people long and they were letting people in in small groups and once in the customers only got 15 min. shopping time. People were driving up to an hour away to get get and still waiting in line for about 2 hours to fill up, while others never ended up getting any at all. The DJS on the radio were not playing music, it was just people calling in all over the Houston area letting other people know where they were finding supplies, food and fuel. We were ok on the foos side of things, but we definitely did not have any more ice. We had a bunch of friends over Sun. night and put all the meat we had in our freezer on the grill to share. 

Monday morning we woke up to find that our land line no longer worked! By Mon. late afternoon, we found out that Brett's company was going to be putting us up in a hotel about 45 min. away since it was estimated that our power could be out for up to 3 weeks! We were so grateful and excited to be able to go somewhere where there was power and where the surrounding stores and restaurants were open. So here we are until at least Fri. waiting for our power to return. We just found out that a friend of ours who lives a couple of neighborhoods down from us, just got power back on late this afternoon, so we are REALLY hoping it will be soon!!!