Drive from hell

Yesterday, I drove from Houston to Slidell, LA, a trip that usually takes 5-6 hours. This time, it took 15 hours, and it turns out to have been an exercise in futility.

I had planned to go to St. Mary's today to see Toby and Adam. When Rita was forecast to make landfall around Matagorda Bay, I decided to drive to Slidell on Thursday, so I would be in a position to drive to Alexandria today without having to worry about the storm. I woke yesterday and looked out my window at the Katy Freeway and Houston's famously botched evacuation effort. I gathered my stuff, got in my car, and started driving. I drove through downtown and on to Baytown at 75 mph. Suddenly, traffic came to a near-standstill, and it stayed that way. As I was driving, evacuations were ordered in Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Lake Charles. Beaumont, in particular, was traffic hell. Not even driving on the shoulder and cutting onto the odd feeder road advanced my cause to my satisfaction. I looked at my map and noticed a loop down to Port Arthur and back up to Orange, right near the Louisiana line. It seemed worth the risk, so off I went. I drove very fast down a freeway to P.A., all the while watching an endless line of cars coming from that direction on the northbound side. I turned to go towards Orange and came to a police roadblock. I was told to drive back on that highway with the endless line of cars. While the cop was telling me to do something I had no intention of doing, I noticed that the entrance ramp to the Orange-bound highway was completely open from the other direction. So I made a few u-turns and was off to the races for a couple of miles. I came upon a second police roadblock at the base of the bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway. I couldn't sneak past that roadblock, but I found a side road back to Beaumont that wasn't nearly as congested and, even better, had a gas station with almost no waiting! The stations on I-10 that had gas also had 2-hour lines, so getting gas quickly made my detour worthwhile.

I almost turned back to Houston at that point, but I remembered how terribly gridlocked the city was, and I-10 east from where I met it in Beaumont was moving along relatively well. I thought of how much I wanted to see the kids, so I decided to keep going east. A few miles inside Louisiana, the traffic came to a standstill again. At Lake Charles, I took another detour on the local loop freeway; that detour may have saved me an hour or so. I also had to pee very badly by that point, but I couldn't find an open facility. I saw a dentist's office with an empty parking lot, so I took the exit, got out of my car, and pissed on the landscaping.

Alexandria was the destination of choice for the Lake Charles evacuees, and it sounded as if I could not get there last night. It looks out-of-reach today and tomorrow also due to the weather, so I won't be going up for the kind of weekend I had wanted. At most, I may get up there Sunday, have a pizza with Toby (he didn't get his trip home this month due to Katrina), then curve back down to Houston--assuming I can get there at all.