One of the problems with going off the grid for a number of days, especially during the summer, is that things can sneak up on you. We spent Labor Day weekend in a beachfront house on Surfside, which is about 50 miles down the Gulf Coast from Houston. We didn’t much care what the weather was, but for the first few days it was quite nice. A few squalls, but mostly sunny, with enough of a breeze to keep it from being unbearably hot sitting on the balcony.
Then, yesterday morning we woke up to strong gusts of wind and rain shooting horizontally at the windows from the gulf side. Turns out Tropical Storm Hermine had formed overnight and we were getting the outer bands as it headed toward landfall. Its track was going to take it well west of us, but we were on the wet side of the storm and it wasn’t going to take much to flood low-lying areas. Already we observed that the tide was in higher than we’d ever seen it, and high tide wasn’t expected for another several hours. The last things we wanted were: 1) to get stranded and 2) to have the car flooded (or 3 — both), so we decided to pack up and head for home. The place we were staying was roughly where the right-hand edge of the red blob in this photo intersects the mainland.
Fortunately, Monday night was a lagniappe. I received a call from the realtors on Friday saying we could stay on until Tuesday for free because no one else was coming in for the week. So we weren’t out anything by leaving “early.” We drove through some occasional heavy rains on the way home, and there were a few places where the right-hand lane had heavy water and some of the service roads were inundated, but it wasn’t bad. Today we’re still getting a lot of rain and the interstates are flooded in places, so it looks like we made the right call. We’re also under tornado watch, with a risk of hail.
We had a relaxing time of it all the same. Cooked some great meals, read a lot. I finished Star Island by Carl Hiaasen and got over halfway through The Devil’s Company by David Liss. This book, which is part of a series, reminds me of the recent historical novels of Robert McCammon. We also started reading The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith, which is essentially a No. Ladies’ Detective Agency novel set in Scotland. Isabel Dalhousie, the protagonist, even has an assistant named Grace who isn’t much different from Mma Makutsi.
Have some recorded TV shows to catch up on from the weekend. Sons of Anarchy starts its new season tonight on FX, too.
