The hurricane was here...

It could have been much worse. For a lot of people, it was, unfortunately. Somehow we managed to escape the highest winds, as they came to shore about 30 miles north of us. Corpus Christi avoided almost all of it, save a few knocked out traffic lights and road signs. Rockport and Port Aransas suffered the worst of it, with the winds hitting more than 130 miles per hour and tearing everything apart. The devastation was unbelievable. Portland looks like a different town too, with so many trees gone, shingles scattered everywhere, and fences down in almost every yard around town. The piles of tree branches line the streets and make it feel like you're driving through tunnels. The power of the wind can be unbelievable. I was honestly hoping to stay and weather the storm, but on Thursday the city issued a mandatory evacuation and we had to pack it up and get out. We boarded up the house, packed what we could into the van, and drove to Austin. It was a surreal weekend, not knowing whether our house was still going to be here whenever we were allowed to come back. Had the storm come in a little farther south, that might have been the case. On Sunday, a friend of ours went back and sent us pictures, then we found out the power came back on for our house that evening. As I write this a full week later, there are still houses in Portland without power, and in the other towns, it may be several more weeks. I have to give credit to the power companies, because there were dozens of trucks all over town putting up power lines and trying to get people back up all last week. People from all over the country have come to help out the communities around here and in Houston. We've been through tropical storms before, but one thing is for sure, we won't forget Hurricane Harvey.

Thankfully, whoever owned this house before us knew there was a need for plywood. I didn't know why there was so much in the garage when we moved in, but it definitely came in handy, and it was already pre-cut to fit all the windows and doors.

The boys helped put it up, but the evening was so nice it didn't really seem like there was any need for it.

So much for my double gate. I just put this all up about a year or so ago.

I think if we hadn't taken the mat off the trampoline it would have ended up on our roof or in someone else's yard. I saw one tangled up in someone's tree.

It almost didn't make sense how the wind decided to hit. Some things were destroyed that you wouldn't expect, while some fences that were already falling down somehow survived.

But the storm went away finally, as we knew it would. There was another beautiful sunset over South Texas by Monday.

We're also very thankful we're a little higher above sea level and the city is set up in a way that flooding isn't normally an issue. The people in Houston haven't been as lucky with this storm.

We survived. The house survived. There's nothing more we could ask for than that. If you live down here, you know it's only a matter of time before the next one comes, but since they said this was the worst storm in the last 50 years down here, we're hopeful we won't see another one like it for a while.