Evacuation Vacation
It has been quite busy lately around the Cross Eyed Kat lair. First, there was all the prep work to do for the St. Charles Market aka the Fall Needlework Market. Once I got everything to this state, I still had to do the printing. This was a bit tricky as I was running low on the bags that the charts go into. How did I go through another thousand of those? That amazes me. Anyway, I decided how many of each new and old chart to print and got to work. I was feeling pretty good to get all of my printing done nearly a week before market. This was so unlike me, to be ready for market ahead of time, something had to happen.
The “something” turned out to be Ike. I tried telling it to go away, and it listened for a while, but then turned back toward Houston. We hemmed and hawed about whether or not to go, but finally decided to get out of Dodge. We flew out Thursday night and landed safely in Missouri. While we were gone, we had friends who were under a mandatory evacuation evacuate to our house before heading further inland.
While we were in Missouri, we had planned to see the Tour of Missouri, since it would be ending in St. Charles the day the Market started. Who could ignore this confluence of stitching and bicycling that seemed made for us? By going up Thursday, we were able to see the stage 5 finish in Jefferson City.
I’ll post some more pictures of the Tour when I get them off the camera – this was taken with my phone. The tour was fun – we walked all around the capitol building, had lunch at a little cafe, watched a looping criterium, and then got to watch the end of the Tour stage three times, since it went in a small circuit around the buildings. We stayed to watch the awards ceremony (something we didn’t get to do in Georgia), so we saw the Governor and some other state officials.
Saturday, we got the room ready for Market, then headed off to downtown St. Charles. This is a quaint section of the old town just off the Missouri River with restraunts and shops – including this dog bakery.
We had lunch at an outdoor cafe, then wandered up and down the Main street. There was a cross-stitch store and they had a stitched model of “Ribbons” in the window! The Tour went by in blur – it was a bunch sprint to the finish and Mark Cavendish won, keeping his lead in the green jersey!
Saturday night, Sunday and Monday were the Market, so we were busy with that, along with keeping tabs on what was going on back home. We couldn’t completely relax with the hurricane happening. Here’s what part of the room looked like for Market:
Luckily, the airline started flying into Houston again by the time we were due back. We went to the grocery store, since our power had been out for three days and we’d have to clean out the fridge and freezer. It was mostly stocked, although a few areas looked like this:
So no milk, eggs, tortillas, or prepackaged breakfast pastries. Part of our fence blew down, so we got that propped up, and are working on cleaning up all the branches and pine cones in the yard. This morning I passed the Walmart, and I didn’t see a line at the gas station for the first time in a week!
Mocha came through the storm fine – she was boarded at her vet’s office and they staffed the building through the storm and had a generator for the power outage.
Things are slowly getting back to normal, at least in our part of the city; there still 60% of the area without power. Also, the destruction on Galveston and the surrounding areas is just heartbreaking.