IKE has come and gone...the recap

Well, we are back in our home. We have power (don't want to be in south Texas in the summer without A/C), we have water and sewer service, and we are very fortunate to have far less damage and inconvenience than many in our area. We count ourselves as very blessed indeed.

Here are a few pictures and a bit of explanation:



We got things all boarded up to leave. With all the boards up it's pretty dark in the house. Our first day back we still had the boards up and the sun had been up for quite a while before we woke up...it was still dark as night inside.

We wanted to go as far west as we could to get out of the path of the storm. We were originally planning to go past San Antonio, but as we were getting close we decided San Antonio was far enough. We asked for a room with two queen-sized beds and a roll-away. We got a room with a king-sized bed and a roll-away. We had to be a bit more cozy than we wanted, but managed well enough. We had complimentary breakfast every morning, ate one big meal out each day, and snacked on stuff in our room. CNN and The Weather Channel were our media lifeblood.

We took Shadow to PetSmart the first day in San Antonio to get her cleaned up and smelling a lot prettier than she did. We tried to get her boarded at least for some of the daytime periods, but she needed a vaccine for something called Kennel Cough, which she didn't have, so PetSmart wouldn't put her in their kennel area. She did get her needed clean up though. The pet groomer said Shadow had a pretty quick snap at her at times, but when the blow dryer came on the blow dryer became the enemy and the groomer was her friend and comfort. Shadow got cleaned up and tolerable for the duration of our stay.

That's not to say we were spared entirely. We knew from previous evacuation experiences that dog farts are silent but deadly. We had to make use of the spray air freshener quite a bit.

Charlissa and I had Shadow in the Grand Am with us both to and from San Antonio, and our eyes were watering big time on a few occasions, particularly as we were within a few miles of home on the return trip. We opened the windows in the back of the car so she could get a snif of home, and the air coming in her nose at highway speed seemed to go right through her (yeah...eyes watering :-o).



Our neighbors kept us posted on what sort of damage we would see when we got home. Fences were down and a couple of spots on the roof with shingles missing.

As we were cleaning up there were a number of military cargo planes flying into Ellington Field (we kind of live in the landing pattern for the main runway). This picture doesn't really do justice to how big these planes really are. They were HUGE and coming in about every hour or every half hour for a while on Tuesday as we were cleaning. I'm sure they were bringing in much needed relief supplies.

Things cleaned up pretty well as you can see. We have two stacks of debris like the one you can see in this picture. The other one is on the other side of the driveway and is mostly garbage bags and extra wood stuff.

Like I say, we are pretty lucky. We'll get out some other pictures when we can, or you can see some of the more major storm damage on the news.