Texas has been an exciting place for the past few days. Hurricane Harvey quickly turned into BAD business for the coast and the Houston area, blowing the earlier projections out of the water and becoming a Cat 4 by the time it made landfall. The real problem is the flooding from the now basically stationary storm, dumping literally FEET of rain into parts of that area so far.

Luckily everyone I know in the area either evacuated or is still faring ok to this point. It’s far from over, since the rain is expected to continue for the rest of the week, but hopefully everyone remains ok. It’s heartbreaking to watch the destruction on TV (not gonna lie, I feel a special kind of fury every time I see a dog or a horse). If you want to know how you can help, click here to find out more.

Over here in Austin we’ve gotten quite soaked from the outer edges of the storm, but nothing like what they’re dealing with. At my house we’re up to about 7″ of rain, with more to come, but we’re on higher ground with better drainage, so there hasn’t been any flooding to speak of in our area. It’s yucky out, and the wind was crazy for the first day or so, but that’s about it. Henry is warm and dry and tucked into his stall with his hay. The barn is on top of a hill and farm’s soil drains well, so no problems there.

Of course, both Houston airports are closed. On Friday I was starting to get pretty anxious about our Europe trip. It was already quite clear that we would not be able to leave from Houston. By mid-day Delta finally extended their travel waiver through the 28th, meaning I could change to another airport without paying the change fee. Of course, they still wanted to charge me a “fare difference” of 1k. Hilarious bunch of assholes.

After some minor panic on my part, a friend of mine was able to use her pull as an elite member to get them to not only waive the fare difference, but to let me reroute through Austin. Originally when I was booking this trip, leaving through Austin was A LOT more expensive than leaving through Houston. I’d have even been happy to leave through Dallas, honestly, but leaving through Austin is obviously waaaay more convenient. I don’t have to drive 3 hours to another city and pay to park my truck for a week. So ultimately we dodged a bullet with that (THANK YOU ANNA) and kinda came out ahead in the end.

Our flight is supposed to leave around noon today, and we layover in Atlanta before hopping the flight to Brussels. Hopefully we’re able to get out on time, or close to it, and don’t have too many travel issues. Between all the stress with work lately, and then the anxiety of the past week worrying about the weather and whether or not this trip was actually going to happen, I’m in serious need of some mental downtime. And waffles. Lots of waffles.

I’ll do my best to keep posting here and on Instagram for as long as I have access to WiFi. So, hopefully the next time you guys hear from me, it’ll be from our hotel in Bruges. Fingers crossed, anyway!