STORM

There's nothing like a hurricane to put some excitment into a trip to the beach. A week or so before we planned to head down to the South Texas coast to Rockport, a large mass of clouds appeared in the weather forecast. Pretty soon these clouds were named Alex. One of the storm tracking models put landfall right on top of us. We weren't going to let that discourage us so off we went. The first few days of vacation included plenty of time watching the Weather Channel. The day before the storm hit, things got wild.

This is the bay coming over the sea wall. Note the electrical transformer in the foreground. We'll discuss it later.

Being the adventurous types, we found it necessary to go out for a drive during all of this. When we came home, the garage door didn't open. (This was the first clue). Perhaps it was stuck. The quiet house, lacking the hum of the air conditioner and refrigerator confirmed the real story - the power was out. It was still light so we were not concerned, surely it will come back on soon. At dusk we decided to look for flashlights. No. Back to the HEB. After a lovely candlelight dinner off the grill (aha, not electric) we called it a night.

I opened one eye in the morning to search for small red lights on various plugged in things. No. House still quiet. Coffee maker requires electricity - not good. Maybe it will be back on when we return from the restaurant. No. Whoever decided that it was a good idea to install a transformer five feet from the bay was not planning ahead. This is a coastal town where there might be some expectation of high waves. The guys who were out all night working on it agreed that it was not such great planning. Thanks to their hard work, the power finally came on. 24 hours after going off.   

Alex ended up as a category 1 hurricane that hit about 250 miles south of us. The outer bands of the storm were quite large and covered a huge area. The high water and flooding was extensive.

These are fishing piers:

These folks didn't need a pier, they fished in the street:

The deck actually ends past the pilings: