Posted by Johnnymac 9:25 PM
We made it to Austin and are now safe and sound at my brother's house. We left at 10:30am and arrived at 8:30pm. Our route was a bit circuitous and we might have made it sooner had we not started from Sugar Land.

Here's the story: The people on Channel 2 this morning said that 59 South was running smoothly because it was not an "official" evacuation route so we thought we would try it. Bad idea - we were flying 70+ mph in between the Loop and the Beltway but then we got to the Beltway and hit the backup hard. Oops. So we exited and took Bissonnet west to Grand Parkway and then north through Cinco Ranch and Katy via Mason Road over the fabulous new I-10 parking lot and northwest into Waller County. Luckily I had this book and had ridden my bicycle in the area and we were able to take a lot of the back roads with hardly any problem all the way to Bellville. In fact, we probably averaged 55+ mph between Katy and Bellville.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize from the map in my book that three major highways intersect at the same single lane courthouse square in Bellville and we ended up sitting in Bellville for two hours as we crawled about 3 miles through the bottleneck.

But that was it - after Bellville we took 159 west and managed 50+ mph all the way to LaGrange and then Bastrop (via the MS150 backroute) and on into Austin. In Austin we hit 290 and ran into evacuation traffic again, except that what had taken us 10 hours took some of those people 14 or more.

Anyway, we're here. I have no idea for how long or when we can go back, but at least we're not sitting at home waiting for the windows to blow out.

2 Comment(s):

Posted by  Dr Fro, at 8:48 AM, September 23, 2005  

for every story like this, i have been told 20 that end with turning around due to very low gas tanks and complete bottleneck

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Posted by  Johnnymac, at 11:45 AM, September 23, 2005  

Yeah, I forgot to mention the part about making Rachel fill the Honda up with gas on Tuesday morning when I realized what was going to happen. By yesterday morning the car still had 7/8ths of a tank left and I was able to top it off from the large can of gas that I keep in the garage for the yard tools and "emergencies". The gas situation is definitely the scary part and is a major part of this story for most people stuck on the highways.

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