Yesterday, after work, my wife and I decided to get out. We packed valuables, memorabilia, and a couple days of clothes and away we went. The decision-making process was a little weird. Value per unit volume seemed to be a key criteria. It's a lot easier to pack up my RAID server than my entire computer, for example. We took my wife's wedding dress, since it has obvious sentimental value, but left behind all my suits, including the wedding one, since they're entirely generic and easily replaced (not to mention, most don't quite fit any more...).

We decided to take both cars. In hindsight, this was a mistake. Had we taken one car, we would have been able to alternate sleeping and driving vs. the near hallucinogenic experience of trying to keep yourself cogent while staring at an infinite series of red taillights. Sure, we would have had less capacity for stuff, but we'd have lived with it.

We hit the road around 9pm, headed for Dallas. Normally, it's a 4 hour drive (~250 miles). We actually arrived at my parents' place at 2:30pm the next day. We initially got on the Hardy Tollroad, which runs parallel to I-45 and which had no appreciable traffic until it was about four miles away from merging into I-45. From then up to the point at I-45 contracted down to the two-lane road that's used for inter-city traffic, it was pure hell. We were effectively trapped in a 10 mile long queue of nearly ten lanes that fed a limited number of cars into a two-lane road. During this period (10pm to about 4am), we were averaging about 1.5 miles per hour. I thought, for sure, that I was going to destroy my transmission every time I was barely starting in first and then had to slam on the clutch and brake. Every time you do that (i.e., drop engine power and slam the clutch), my transmissions makes this entirely unpleasant slamming sound. Anyone care to remote diagnose?

Anyway, once we got into the two-lane inter-city road, things improved thereafter. In particular, once we completely left behind the Houston suburbs for true, rural nowhere, we started going sometimes as fast as 30mph. However, it seemed that, throughout the day, the traffic's group velocity would randomly change for no discernable reason. Sometimes we were going 70mph. Other times 10mph.

Once the sun came up, and once I was dangerously nodding off and catching myself, we pulled over at a rest stop. Walking around and getting fresh air and sunshine is invaluable. We ended up gassing back up at Maddisonville (roughly half-way on the 250 mile drive). Several gas stations were already out of gas. The one we went to was running out of regular, but still had plenty of premium. If we were only a couple hours later, we could well have not been able to get the necessary tank refill. I've heard from two separate sets of friends that they abandoned their evacuations for precisely this sort of reason and retreated back to their homes. Expect to hear a lot of discussion of gasoline supplies in the aftermath examination. If a city's evacuation plan is all about using private cars, then there need to be a plan for how they're refueled during the evacuation. (For what it's worth, that 1.5 mph slow crawl yielded 10 mpg versus my car's normal ~20mpg city / 25mpg hwy.)

Once we got past the half-way point, the average speed picked up in a big way. Earlier, I feared we wouldn't get in until late this evening. Instead, we arrived early enough to actually relax a bit (or, in my case, to catch up on a deluge of email...).

Latest news: they're apparently trying to send out "fuel trucks" to refuel cars on the road. How are they going to pull that off?