The Great IKE Evacuation

I have always doubted a hurricane would never hit Houston...Louisiana always sucks them in. In my last 6 years as a Houstonian I was right...until Saturday, September 13th. Enter Ike. My husband and I had a family reunion planned to Palm Desert, California leaving Saturday the 13th...bad timing. Thankfully Southwest allowed us to change our tickets to Thursday the 11th, and after closing up our house and a 7 hour wait at Hobby Airport (we were taking no chances) we "evacuated" to San Diego.

I was VERY happy that I decided to start my gardening endeavor in containers...the veggies were moved into the kitchen before we left!

We decided to take advantage of our few extra vacation days and tour San Diego. We headed to the beach and sampled some of the local breweries. Pizza Port in Solana Beach, Lost Abbey, and Stone. Stone had a beautiful beer garden and a wonderful restaurant. Nice way to spend an evacuation. In keeping with the "all things local" theme of this blog, not shocking to anyone I am sure, Palm Desert is not the source of the thousands of fresh fruits and veggies we receive from California year-round. Turns out Dates thrive in Palm Desert! Apparently they supply something like 90% of the U.S. Consumption of Dates.

Our wonderful friends who stayed in Houston kept us up to date with the hurricane status as it made landfall, and were able to navigate the streets the day after the hurricane in order to assure us that our house was still standing. It turns out we had some significant shingle damage which allowed water to leak from our 2nd story down into the kitchen. Except for the tree carnage, that was about all the damage we received. Our fabulous friends also spent their "Hurrication" free time cleaning up our yard and pool. Amazing!! We joked that we might leave the state for EVERY hurricane :)