Friday night, the storm continues towards the Texas coast, but a small bit of good news tells us that the storm has weakened to a category 4 storm and that the eye may be moving more towards Beaumont, Texas which would put the storm surge into Louisiana instead of our area. I was worn out and could barely stay awake, but called my brother regularly throughout the night to check on his status. He kept saying that the winds were somewhat high, but they had only little rain and only gusts of really high wind. I finally fell asleep and called in the morning to find out that the storm had passed and the damage seemed minimal. My brother later called to tell me that he checked my home and there seemed to be no damage. My home was still intact! The mayor of Houston was telling people that evacuees of the La Porte area should not return, but I had my brother call to see if we would be turned away if we returned. The advice was that we should not return, but we wouldn't be stopped if we did return. We talked about it as a family and had conflicting responses (some discussion was to go now, some was to wait until the next day, some was to stay in the hotel for a week until all traffic was back to normal). We finally made a decision to go for it and come home. We stopped at every gas station on the way home to stay full on gas and even bought and filled about a dozen gas cans in the event gas became a problem. The traffic into town wasn't as bad as leaving and although many gas stations were closed or without gas we managed to get back home without having to use our spare gas cans we had filled.