Gustav, past tense

Sitting at a picnic table at a Texas rest stop, watching the traffic go by. Interstate in front of me, local access road behind me (not much traffic there), and beyond the access road is

Jb's D- PLACE
FULLBLOOD
SIMMENTAL CATTLE
---
QUALITY FAMILY FISHING
MEMBERSHIPS
OPEN

Do I pick the classy places or what?

It's just barely possible this entry will actually get posted the day it was written. Texas is one of the states that have decided travellers would appreciate free wi-fi at its rest stops. In my case they're certainly right.

Of course it went down as soon as I tried to use it but I'm hoping it'll come up again soon. The caretaker was in the storage room when it quit, and he let me look at the router. No power. Its power strip was hooked into a lamp timer. If I was interpreting the thing right it cuts the router off for a few minutes once a day, probably for a reset. We'll see.

(It's working! It's working!)

I've covered about 500 miles today, between Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Orange, Texas. Baton Rouge and New Orleans were just south of me somewhere in the middle. Strange how little you see of a disaster from any noticeable distance. Other than a few broken trees and some really messed-up billboards (one had fallen on somebody's mobile home--a crane was carefully removing it), the only real signs of Gustav I had were:

• Traffic was much heavier going toward that part of Louisiana than away from it. The evacuees started returning early this time, it appears.
• I saw quite a few trucks--from pickups to flatbed tractor-trailers--carrying portable generators of every size known to man.
• During those five hundred miles I counted twenty-six convoys headed into the area--from various tree-surgeon companies. Something like 100-150 cherry-picker trucks with their support crews. And that's just the ones I saw.
  

I think I'll leave it there. I just can't think of a clever remark to go with that...