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Our neighbors had taped some of their windows, and I soon started taping some of our windows. Between packing up the house, boarding up and taping windows, there were additional calls and e-mail reports on how well the people on my Team were prepared. It was pretty hectic. About 10:00 PM church leaders called and asked me to tell me families the local presiding church leader had issued an evacuation recommendation, and they would appreciate if each of our families could be told before they went to sleep. I was able to contact each of my assigned families between 10:00 and 10:45 PM.
Then we went back to work packing up the house and taping the windows. Paintings were taken off of the wall and put under the covers of the bed. My web site3.129 was shut down for the first extended time in almost a decade, and the computers and disk drives loaded in the the trunk of the car with all of my journals and a box of important papers. The other car was parked in the garage. It was about 2:30 AM Thursday morning when we were ready to evacuate. I gave a blessing on the house, we packed for a week, and we left.
As we drove up to the freeway, it was obvious all of the cars were stopped dead on the freeway and on the frontage road. We went under the freeway and took the back roads. It took us about a half-an-hour to go as far as some folks on the freeway took 4 or 5 hours to go. It took us an hour to go from Brookshire on I-10 across the Brazos River bridge to the Sealy exit, which is about 10 miles. Then we got off the freeway and took the back roads to Austin. The entire trip took us about 4 1/2 hours, and normally is a 2 1/2 hour drive. Most friends we talked to took between 8 and 12 hours to make a similar drive. When we got to the airport, we parked in the parking lot, in order to provide some protection for the computers, family photos, diaries, and other papers from the 95+ degree heat wave. And later in the day we were in Utah for the wedding on Saturday. Of course, our worries did not end, because we had adult children in Houston and over by Beaumont, where the storm had turned and eventually hit. To stress how things can be acted upon, including people, here is part of an e-mail our oldest daughter sent out:
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`WOW! What a week. As most of you know, the eye of Hurricane Rita went straight through our town of Vidor, TX & affected so much of the area around us.
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paradoxes