On the road aga....still?

Talk about your long car drives. My humans decided to evacuate in front of Hurricane Rita. I was personally getting worried by what Frank Billingsley was saying about where the storm was headed Wednesday night, so I think they made the right choice. My humans packed as much stuff as it was possible to fit in two cars, including a lot of my binkies (VERY important) and my favorite toys. They were running around until the wee hours of the morning packing, and it really interfered with my sleep! But I tried to be patient.

I had plenty of opportunity to rest the next day. Living in Houston, you think you know bad traffic, right? Wrong. It took 12 hours to get to Austin, a trip that normally takes 3. And that was after we skipped the worst of the traffic by taking the 290 HOV lane, as instructed to do by those helpful traffic signs on the highway. It was literally everyone and their humans on the road, and inside the Beltway, most of them were out of their cars, walking, sitting on the HOV barrier, or taking pictures. Insanity! Did I mention it was close to 100 degrees that day? Lucky for me, though, Bunny bought a Prius in July, so even in the stop-and-go traffic we were able to sit in air-conditioned comfort. Which is good, because it was a looooong sit.


I got pretty bored after a while and finally started keeping track of how long it was taking us to go forward. Here's a table and a graph showing the entire trip. (Click on the picture for a larger version.) It took us 8 1/2 hours to get past the roundy-round bottleneck in Brenham. We thought we were home free for a bit, but we sooned slowed back down to a crawl and stayed there until we got past Giddings. Giddings has what may be the world's most incongruous eatery, the "Fresh Donuts and Seafood Restaurant."