When I heard that hurricane Rita was going to hit...I expected that it would make a last minute turn and miss our town like most the others do. I thought we\'d be back in time for school on Monday. We started packing our things and getting ready to leave, it didn\'t hit me until the morning that we evacuated, how serious it was. We started to leave and I started crying uncontrollably while watching my house fade away as we drove off. Traffic was too bad so we had to come back home and try to find a different route. We left that night for Fort Worth and drove for about 20 hours...the normal trip would take about 5. The whole night we had a phone calling chain...our friends were constantly calling each other to check on one another. We finally got to our hotel room and stayed there for 2 and a half weeks. It was very cramped and uncomfortable, I had to sleep on a pull out bed that was so hard there might as well have not been a matress on it. I kept hearing reports that school might not start for months and I never wanted so badly to go back to school in my life. A few of my friends had started schools in other towns and I was scared that I\'d never see them again. It was my 10th grade year and I wanted to graduate from this school...not have to move away. 2 and a half weeks later we finally went home to find that our house was perfectly okay except that our fence was blown down. We had no electricity but we got it only a few days after getting home. The destruction of our small town was heart breaking though. Signs were thrown everywhere, the church that my dad pastors was mostly alright except that the sign had been knocked down and some of the siding had blown off. School started a couple of weeks before homecoming, which I was afraid they wouldn\'t have because I look forward to it every year. Our senior class this year was deprived of some of the things our other classes got, and their last year was cut short. But all in all we came out okay, and life gradually returned to normal. None of my friends moved and we\'re all still together...so I am very blessed and I never want to experience this again.