Conor Twomey fled Houston in the worst traffic jam in American history.
At the US launch of the new Passat near Boston, we're far enough off the beaten track for our mobile phones to be all but useless - once we hit the highway, my mobile erupts. Hurricane Rita has grown from a Category Two to a Category Five Hurricane, and it's heading straight for our home town of Houston.
I get the last flight for Houston, arriving at 10.30 on Wednesday night. The storm isn't due to make landfall until the early hours of Friday morning but already the roads are bumper to bumper as two million Houstonians attempt to flee the city.
The plight of the Katrina victims is still fresh in all of our minds and, not wanting to be stuck in a strange city with only the clothes on our backs, it seems everyone has loaded up their vehicles with everything of value and hit the road.
I'm driving from the airport north of the city for 40 minutes on the southbound lanes and the traffic on the opposite side doesn't budge. People are out of their vehicles, sitting on the dividing wall, slowly going insane.
At home, we decide what to bring and what to leave. We leave our truck because there is no petrol anywhere in the city, so at the risk of making it seem that this article was brought to you by Volkswagen, I'm driving a VW Jetta GLi (basically a Golf GTI with a boot) this week for evaluation so we decide to take it instead, as it still has half a tank of petrol left and should be more economical than the truck.
My wife's family lives in New Braunfels, a historic little town between San Antonio and Austin some 270km away to our west just off Interstate 10.
On the news we see that people travelling west are getting just 10km in eight hours, which prompts me to get online and find an alternative route out of the city.
Many people have run out of petrol and have to sit in Houston's 40-plus degree heat and stifling humidity for hours until local authorities can give them a couple of litres of petrol to tide them over for another mile or two.
For almost 200km traffic is stopped dead on the northbound and westbound arteries. Armed with a print-off of an ordnance survey map and using the compass fitted to the Jetta we use residential streets, and dirt roads and lanes to circumnavigate the bedlam.
With only 50 km left in our tank we finally found petrol in the small town of Gonzales, 80 km south of our destination, and I cannot explain the relief I felt as I pumped $40 of petrol into the Jetta's tank.
Though the secondary roads were anything but traffic free, the major advantage of using these roads was that it wasn't a big deal to turn around and find another way whenever we encountered a bad jam.
So what have we all learned from this? I'm not convinced a rail system would have been much use in a situation like this anyway.
There are enough roads to get people out, it's just that 90 per cent didn't know of any alternative to the highway. Multiple, signposted evacuation routes; designated fuelling and water stations; and a zone-by-zone controlling of the exodus is all that is needed for a speedy and efficient evacuation.
For many SUV and truck drivers, I think this will be the last straw. America is fast learning that its dependence on oil is a bad thing and as demand spirals for more efficient vehicles, the race to offer alternatives will be fast and furious.
I think Americans are beginning to realise that their dependence on the car leaves them at the mercy of many, many factors, all totally beyond their control. The havoc Rita created had nothing to do with Mother Nature's wrath. It was a man-made catastrophe years in the making.