humberto 2007

we interrupt the scheduled sunday information to bring you this breaking story…
yesterday afternoon at work my manager called to let us know we could leave early if we needed to take care of some business before the tropical storm hit. the tropical storm? that’s right, humberto had stealthily appeared at our southern border out of almost nowhere. with supposedly sustained winds of 25-30 miles per hour and gusts up to 50 or 60 mph possible, a co-worker and i immediately knew there was only one option — road trip! we hopped in his rx-8 and headed toward the coast. we decided to take 288 down to freeport, then ride the coast up galveston island back to 45.
i had a good time, but to be honest it wasn’t breathtaking or anything. the wind was blowing pretty decently, but nothing exceptional. the waves were breaking along the coast line pretty heavily, but not really out of control. it rained, sometimes pretty heavily, but again nothing exceptional that i saw. the only very traumatic part of the trip was when i went to quickly tiptoe through a puddle on a sidewalk in the wind and rain and the puddle ended up getting deeper and going on for about 20 yards. i was wearing my brand new pair of vans for the first day, and they got soaked. (when i got home, my other new pair of vans were waiting for me at the door, so i wore them today and joked about the wetness changing the color.) other than that, the trip mostly involved driving along and making a bunch of smart remarks while filming with the co-worker’s video camera. and eating beef jerky and bbq corn nuts and drinking gatorade. (because we needed emergency supplies in case something went horribly wrong.)
we did see several local news trucks down along the seawall near the landmark hotel. i think they picked it for the same reason we stopped there — it was one of the few places that had lights out over the water, so you could see the water hitting the pylons and the rain blowing around the building in the wind. and the occasional body boarder walking by to go down into the water. heh.
i did of course miss part of the radio show to participate in this event. but jay, ever the gracious taskmaster, saw the hard-hitting, fact-finding, award-worthy investigative journalism that was bound to come out of this pursuit so he allowed me to skip. i called into the show to give a live humberto 2007 update, and actually made it back into houston in time to show up for the last 30 minutes or so of the show.
i’m glad i did it, but hopefully next time there’ll be more to see. (where ever i’m heading next time probably won’t have the same hope.) it looks like — as with rita — beaumont and the Texas-louisiana border saw more action overnight than we did. fortunately for me, the main complainer about my snarky comments about rita no longer lives in the area so i shouldn’t have to deal with any of his “anonymous” sniping this time around.