Hurricane Ike!! Yikes!!!!

HURRICANE IKE!! LOOK OUT TEXAS!!!

As most of you know by now, Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast at Galveston Island on Saturday morning, Sept 13th at about 2am. Most of you have seen the devastation to the area that was directly hit, but I thought that I would share with you some pictures from our neighborhood.
We were not here when the storm hit. We were in Dallas (look for another post in the next few days showing what we were doing there), but we monitored the storm frequently and were in touch with our neighbors as it got closer and after it hit.
Our neighborhood lost power about 4:30 Saturday morning, but it came back on about 5:30 Sunday evening. We returned home on Monday night. Our home did not sustain any damage. We just had debris in our yard to clean up. Others in our neighborhood did not fair as well. Some had trees down on their houses, some had water leaking into their houses because roofs were damaged. Some had windows and sides of houses blown out. We had a lot of trees in the neighborhood down as you will see from the slide show below. All in all though, our area was in good shape. We were on the "clean" side of the storm. There are still many people without power. Some will not get it back for 2-3 weeks. Galveston and other areas that were closest to the storm coming on shore will be out of commission for a long time.
As of right now, the kids are out of school through Friday. We are hoping they can return on Monday, but we will see. We are all well and appreciate all of you that have called or emailed to check on us.

The first slide show is pictures from our yard.

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This slide show has pictures from around our neighborhood. We took a bike ride tonight and took some pictures of what we saw. As you can see a lot of the downed trees have already been cut up. I will try to get some pictures of what it looked like right after the storm so you can get a better idea of what things were like.