Keep your gas tanks filled... It's hurricane season

So at the moment all the electronic highway signs are flashing the same message - "Keep your gas tanks filled... It's hurricane season".

This means that I currently don't have any idea how busy the roads are because their usual function has been usurped - they usually show how long it will take to get from that point to the next major junction or location. It's nice to know it's 10 minutes to my destination when I get to the i45 because then I know traffic is light and I don't have to think about alternate ways to get home... but now I don't know... because it's hurricane season.

If you don't live here, you might think it's a good idea to warn people of this so that they are informed (and have a full gas tank). However, if you did live here, you would know all about the hurricane season because there's nothing but hurrican Gustav on the local TV channels at the moment.

This is Gustav:

If you look at Texas on that map, we're somewhere to the North West of Galveston Bay, which is the large bay to the South East of TX. In fact we're not far from the crossing of 30N/95W which is just inside the largest circle.

Wow, you might think - no wonder they're warning everyone... but look at that scale - the storm isn't going to get much larger but they have almost no idea this far out where it actually will make landfall. So the prediction is for it to make landfall somewhere between Corpus Christi, TX and the Florida panhandle - a stretch of coast 600 miles long.

And that landfall is at least 4 days away!

But we hear New Orleans has evacuation plans in motion (tomorrow is the anniversary of Katrina) and we were shown evacuation zones on our local news this morning.

But that's ok - we're going to be out of town for the weekend. We have the late flight back so we land at 12.30am on Tuesday morning... at least one model has Gustav visiting here at 1am on Tuesday!...

Woohoo - we filled our gas tank, it is hurricane season. And only 3 and a bit months left to go.