After all our anxiety about the “devastating” hurricane, we ended up with absolutely no effects at all in our area – we didn’t even lose electricity. We did lose Internet for a few hours, and there were some interesting winds late Monday afternoon, and we lost a couple of somewhat big tree branches, but that’s it. How lucky can we get?! We can’t say that for the rest of the state, as huge areas are without power and many may be without for a month.
Since we were unable to concentrate on much of anything pre-hurricane, we rode our bikes around town again on Sunday morning. Once again, the weather was beautiful. More houses were boarded up, and Chelsea got more photos, thinking we would be able to do some great before and after albums. There was a group of firefighters and police outside the station, so we pulled up on our bikes and chatted for a while, introducing ourselves around. We told them we’d be here for the storm, and we’d holler for help if we needed it.
We were really surprised at how many people had left – the town was like a ghost town – but we didn’t find out until late evening that a mandatory evacuation had been issued for the whole parish (county). Oops! Guess that explains why it was so quiet. We had one very funny incident – we were obviously just out cruising on our bikes, and a white pick-up truck drove by, with a guy who waved at us. We know a few people in white pick-ups, so we waved back and he pulled over to wait for us to catch up. It was a complete stranger. After exchanging the usual hellos, he got right down to business. He leaned out the window and said, “Y’all know there’s a hurricane comin’? I guess we didn’t look stressed enough, and we were having too much fun in the face of a “monster category 5 hurricane”. We laughed and assured him we did, and that we even had a safe place to stay.
The pastor had evacuated on Saturday, so there was only a prayer service instead of a full service. We opted to miss it, since we were still waiting for Hansford and Lea Hair to drop off Lea’s car. While waiting, we sat on the front porch and watched the evacuees flow by. We saw the school buses lining up to take the special needs evacuees wherever they were going; we saw lots of pickup trucks and sedans loaded up; and we saw lots of RVs and trailers. The best sight we saw was a whole herd of cattle, in about 8 different transport vehicles, being taken out to safer grounds. I should note that in Hurricane Rita, which hit only 3 weeks after Katrina, thousands of cattle were drowned in the fields when the storm surge rolled in. It was a near total disaster for those raising cattle.
Chelsea and I had a wonderful afternoon. We spent several hours on our first ever Skype computer call (complete with web cam), with my sister Maureen and her husband Fred. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Maureen in many, many months, so it was a great chance to catch up on everything, and tell Fred and Maureen some of our funnier stories. Chelsea walked the laptop around the house so Fred and Maureen could even see the house, both inside and out. It was totally cool!
After we finished up on the call, I gave Chelsea a haircut with our trusty RoboCut, and she gave me a hair color, with beautiful late afternoon sunshine pouring in through the windows. We figured if we were going down, we’d look really good doing it. 🙂 We got laundry done, and got all cleaned up, and then packed our life’s belongings into the trailers. We moved into the hallway, and got ourselves a regular little home within a home set up – bedding, food, water, computers, camp chairs, the whole nine yards. It was nearly 1 a.m. before we quit and got to bed. During all this we had been chatting on a Gmail phone call with Fred, and found out that he was a bit worried about the hurricane as he was in a mobile home. We invited him to stay with us, as he was in a more direct-hit line, and we were in a much safer house.
Fred packed that night and took off by 6 a.m. (a curfew was in effect for both Abbeville and Kaplan), arriving in Gueydan before 7. Chelsea and I were so tired we could hardly talk or walk, but at least we didn’t have much to do for the day! We were all so tired, that after a couple of hours of watching the latest updates, we finally all three went to sleep – Fred got the couch and Chelsea and I crawled into the hallway. We slept for over 2 hours! Chelsea and I went out for yet another bike ride after our nap – the winds were picking up, but the weather was fine. We rode until the first rain bands starting hitting us. Once again, we met another local – John D Istre, known as John D. He too stopped us, wanting to know who would be riding around “in the face of a hurricane”, seeing the sights and having fun. He admired our attitude.
The rest of the day was unbelievably boring. We watched the television news for a while when Internet went out, and when that got too much, we watched a couple of movies. By 4:30 it became obvious that nothing was going to happen, and by 6, Chelsea and I started putting our things away. It felt a bit like dressing up for a party and finding out it was the wrong night…
Fred hung out for a while on Tuesday, as Abbeville was out of power. Max came by around noon to check on things around the church and the parsonage, and after going on into Abbeville to check on his son’s home, came back and took us out to Johnny’s for lunch. It was quite fun to get out of the house! Meanwhile we hung out with Fred, who treated us to a great chocolate shake from Johnny’s. Fred reluctantly headed out for home on Tuesday afternoon.
Life is nearly completely back to normal for us now, though the last few days have been the usual post-hurricane strangeness. Most businesses were still boarded up until today, as the evacuees trickled back into town. Shutters are still up, and there’s a lot more traffic than usual. There’s the usual steady parade of utility trucks and tree trimming trucks, and more than the usual number of supply trucks for the grocery stores.
So the Gustav adventure turned out really well for us. Now we have Ike to look forward to, and who knows what’s left in the next 2 months! We’ll just keep our heads down and keep writing our book, being thankful that we have such an awesome place to stay, and hope it’s all over with by our departure-from-Gueydan time.