Three day drive

I am here! Last Monday and Tuesday I finished packing, and on Wednesday my mom and I headed out west. We stopped in Austin to visit my sister at Einstein's bagels so we could say hi and give her her birthday presents, and then made another stop in Fort Stockton to have dinner. There is only one restaurant in Fort Stockton (that we could see), and that was an IHOP. Fancy! We spent the night in El Paso, and then continued on I-10 through Tucson and Pheonix to San Bernardino, CA the second day. Multiple times during the drive I would press the seek button on the radio and it would go all the way through the station numbers without picking up a single station!

Once we got into Calfornia, the weather turned extremely nasty, and weird. It was absolutely pouring for a while, and there were giant dust clouds everywhere. Once we got out of the rain, the wind was blowing the dust across the road, and the dust clouds blocked all visibility where they were. I felt like I was driving through the novel Grapes of Wrath. As we got closer to San Bernardino, we started to see thousands of wind mills. They were stacked row upon row, and in the hazy yellow sandy sky they looked very eerie. On Friday morning we drove along the NE end of LA, and the city was extremely hazy/foggy. It was really ugly. Finally, about an hour outside of the city, the fog let up. We drove straight up through the central valley of California, making a stop in Fresno at the In-N-Out burger for lunch, until we got to Davis. From north of LA to Davis (about 300 miles) there wasn't a single cloud in the sky, not even at sunset.

My mom and I have been watching the news every chance we get to see updates on Hurricane Ike. My Dad and Grandparents hunkered down in Houston, and the only damage they both had was that their fences blew over and will need to be replaced. As of this post they still don't have power, but a very lucky cold front blew through Houston so it's not as hot as it could be! My cousin just started his physical therapy program at Galveston, and he evacuated. Hopefully his apartment made it through the hurricane ok.