Gridlock

If you've seen the reports on CNN today about the massive traffic backups in Houston, that's more or less what happened to us yesterday, although we avoided the worst of it by making a big circle around the western edge of Houston. We left really early yesterday morning - before 8, which is incredibly early for us - and there was no traffic to speak of. The water was dead calm so there weren't even all the surfers that we usually get before storms. (The pelicans were having a really great time, though, by all appearances.) We got to my mom's on time, more or less, and got shifted around between cars, and got away, still really early and in light traffic. We had decided not to stay together, and so Rob and I started looking for a place to have breakfast. We were going along the feeder road to the IHOP and my attention wandered for a minute and I somehow managed to hit the curb pretty hard - and the tire immediately went completely flat. We thought at first we were going to get off pretty easy because a very helpful policeman came along and gave us a hand, and there was a Sam's right across the street from the IHOP so we thought, well, we'll just go get a tire there.

But it turned out about half of Houston called in sick to work yesterday (no big surprise, I guess, under the circumstances), so the IHOP was swamped (and we were starving by that time, too) and then there were only two or three guys working in the tire department at Sam's so that took forever, too. And by the time we got on the road again the nice clear highways were no more. We started around the Beltway - the outer loop around Houston - and it was moving at first, if slowly (they had even closed the toll booths), but after a while it really started crawling along, and we finally got off and moved over to Highway 6, which is further out, and then when that started doing the same thing, we went even further out away from Houston. We ended up going to Bryan via Rosenberg and Brenham and Caldwell, which if you look at a map is a good bit out of the way, but we got there in 7 hours (from the time we left Sam's), which is apparently much faster than other people got anywhere. (About three hours of that was actually in Houston traffic, but even after we got out on the little two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, there was still enough traffic that it backed up for 5 miles or so at every light. Just crazy.)