I am Alive

Yes, I am here. I made it through the whole Gustav Debacle okay. I ended up home in Baton Rouge for the storm. We were able to take back roads to avoid contraflow traffic and bring R's mother home to Alexandria and make it back to BR safely. While the family weekend was cut short we all still had a good time. I cooked some good rice and gravy and everyone was happy. R's family decided to evacuate north but my family all stayed in Breaux Bridge. Everyone ended up okay with no damage to homes. Fallen trees and branches were everywhere and tons of people lost power. But everyone we know came out of it okay. Our families were only out of power for a day and a half which was good. The power came back on to our house in BR after about 6 days. We were extremely lucky to have such great neighbors. Our generator of course refused to work but our neighbors were great about letting us stay with them. They plugged up our refrigerator to their generator and we put our window unit in their house. Everything went as well as could have been expected and we got to know our neighbors a lot better in the process. They are great. I know the house may not be perfect but I am so glad R bought that one because the neighbors are so wonderful.

We went ahead and packed some stuff and left for northwest Louisiana on the Wednesday night. R had a meeting scheduled up in Alexandria on the Thursday and then we had decided to go camping from there. Since we had made these reservations weeks before the storm and we knew the campgrounds had power while we still didn't, we hightailed it out of BR. We had quite a good time. We went to North Toledo Bend State Park as well as Hodges Gardens. Both parks were great. The cabins were awesome and well furnished, the weather was quite nice, and we had a great time on the lakes. We rented a boat at both parks and managed to get only a little sunburned. I will have to bring fishing poles next time we go! North Toledo Bend is a nice park and what you would expect from a campground. Hodges Gardens is really neat because it was built by A.J. Hodges. He built the lake and his home on an island and these wonderful botanical gardens with amazing waterfalls. We really enjoyed our time there and loved waking up to a lake view.

So I made it through Hurricane Gustav, had a good camping trip, and made it back to work this week. Now all I have to worry about is Hurricane Ike possibly making landfall near Houston where I live. Hopefully it stays far enough away from me. I want to be able to make it home to BR this weekend before it hits. Keep you fingers crossed for me and everyone else along the Texas coast that Ike is not a bad storm.

I will get back to more regular postings and hopefully will get some pictures of our camping trip up here too!