HOUSTON — Nearly 16 hours after leaving her home, Cecile Kritikakis found herself on a road to nowhere.

Crawling through Houston's northern suburbs yesterday afternoon, the resident of Missouri City, Texas, grew increasingly worried that she would be trapped in her car when the hurricane hit.

"It's hell," she said as she idled on Interstate 45. "There's no gas. There's no food ... the bathroom is a problem.

"I guess at this point my strategy is to pray," Kritikakis said. "I thought about going home, but I probably don't have enough gas to get back. ... At this rate, there are going to be a lot of hurt people."

As cars jammed every inch of highway leading away from Hurricane Rita yesterday, thousands of motorists found themselves spinning their wheels. The largest evacuation in Texas history left drivers inching along, hoping to reach safety before running out of gas, water or patience.

Officials here worried that the clogged roads and lack of gasoline could trap people in cars when the Category 4 storm comes ashore. "If the hurricane comes in at a certain angle," Houston Mayor Bill White said, "being on the highway is a death trap."

In Galveston, a city rebuilt after an unnamed 1900 hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the once-bustling tourist island was all but abandoned, with at least 90 percent of its 58,000 residents cleared out.

Rita's predicted aim shifted eastward yesterday, which could send it away from Houston and Galveston toward Port Arthur, Texas, or Lake Charles, La., at least 60 miles up the coast, by late Friday or early Saturday.

Rita continued to weaken slightly, with sustained winds of 145 mph. The storm was moving west-northwest at about 10 mph with the center about 325 miles southeast of Galveston.

To speed the evacuation, Gov. Rick Perry halted all southbound traffic into Houston along I-45 and took the unprecedented step of opening all eight lanes, including southbound routes, to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston.

But by mid-afternoon yesterday, Kritikakis, her husband and her 17-year-old daughter had not made it far enough north to benefit from the expanded roadway.

And although fuel tankers were stationed along the interstates to provide stranded motorists with gas, Kritikakis had seen no sign of them.

"I'm feeling a little bit abandoned," she said.

Most restaurants and gas stations in the Houston area were shuttered by afternoon, but the Kritikakis family persuaded a liquor-store owner to reopen his shop and sell them Doritos and nuts. Kritikakis said they were not well-equipped for the long haul to Fort Worth.

"We brought some water and snacks, but we didn't expect to be on the road this long," she said.

With temperatures in the 90s, many cars were overheating, as were some tempers.

"I've been screaming in the car," said Abbie Huckleby, who was trapped on Interstate 45 with her husband and two children as they tried to get from the Houston suburb of Katy to Dallas, about 250 miles away. "It's not working. If I would have known it was this bad, I would have stayed at home and rode out the storm at home."

There were reports of people going the wrong way on freeways without authorization, making their own contraflow lanes. Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas cautioned against it.

"I would hope that people use common sense," he said. "This is not an idea where someone can get a traffic ticket. You hit someone head-on and you could possibly lose your life."

Until yesterday, none of the plans for fleeing a major hurricane called for reversing travel on major highways to get more people out of harm's way.

State officials had not planned to make Interstate 45 and Interstate 10 one-way, but bumper-to-bumper traffic forced them to cobble together new plans.

"This was not something we had in place at the time," said Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Gaby Garcia, who said that it required tremendous coordination to close every southbound highway entrance for several hundred miles. "... It wasn't part of our plan. But we had to accommodate the number of people getting out."

Weary travelers formed a steady stream into North Texas yesterday, exhausted but relieved to have reached an area where gas, food and water were readily available.

Daphne Green, who stopped at a Rockwall truck stop to get transmission fluid, had left her Kingwood neighborhood in Houston at 7 a.m. with her two sons and two grandchildren. They packed as many essentials as they could into their SUV, including the grandkids' backpacks, school materials and birth certificates in case they couldn't return to school any time soon.

"I'm hoping my house isn't floating down the street with all my furniture in it," she said with a grim laugh.

Michelle Parsons, filling her fuel tank at the same Rockwall truck stop, said she had left Corpus Christi Wednesday night. She headed to San Antonio, then turned north on her way to Virginia to visit relatives. "I'm making a vacation of this," she said.

She packed everything she considered irreplaceable, including her photographs and cats, and said she wouldn't worry about the rest of her possessions until Hurricane Rita passed.

"I got it before, I can get it again," she said. "If I get home, I get home. If I don't, I don't. I've got what I need."

Compiled from The Dallas Morning News, The Associated Press and The Washington Post