A resident of the western shore of Galveston Bay arrived in Vicksburg Friday, not expecting he’d have a home to return to after Hurricane Rita.

Bob Lynn of Seabrook, Texas, south of Baytown, said he’d left his apartment there and headed toward Interstate 10 at Beaumont, a drive he said took him nine hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Lynn, a retired quality-insurance manager traveling in his pickup with his two cats in the cab and only his most-cherished possessions in the back, was among an estimated 2.8 million people who evacuated about a 500-mile stretch of the upper Texas and southwestern Louisiana coasts as Rita approached that area from the southeast with landfall expected early this morning.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anything to go back to,” said Lynn, 62, adding that he expected his apartment to be flooded. “I’ll probably head down to Tampa, Fla. I have a son there and a daughter in Key West.”

By about 8 p.m. 100 evacuees were in shelters here, 43 at Calvary Baptist Church, 2878 Old Highway 27; 43 at Hawkins United Methodist Church, 3736 Halls Ferry Road; and 14 at Church of Christ, 3333 N. Frontage Road, local American Red Cross executive director Beverly Connelly said.

At Hawkins United Methodist, Josh Sills of Dry Creek, La., northeast of Lake Charles, said he and his family of five decided to take shelter here when they stopped to eat and shop at the Vicksburg Factory Outlet Mall and were directed to the shelter. Sills said the family left home at 2 a.m. and made it to El Dorado, Ark., about 10 hours later, then decided it would be wiser to continue heading east.

“It was kind of a slow go, but it wasn’t too bad,” Sills said of the trip.

The family hoped to be able to leave to return home by about 9 a.m. today, Sills said.

Sills added that the shelter staff at Hawkins had made him and his family feel “really comfortable” on their arrival there at about 6 p.m.

“They’ve made us feel right at home,” he said. “And you couldn’t ask for anything better than that.”

Most of the evacuees were here for the first time and most were from Louisiana, Connelly said.

“The majority were from Lake Charles,” Connelly said, adding that the group included many young families and some senior citizens.

On the same day that shelters opened for Hurricane Rita evacuees, the Vicksburg Convention Center was closed as the main Red Cross shelter for evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coasts Aug. 29 and has been called the worst natural disaster in recorded United States history.

One family may have remained without a place to stay when the convention center shelter closed Friday afternoon and space was made available for it in one of the churches that were opened as a shelter then, Connelly said. The prior reported count of evacuees there had been 20.

At its Friday meeting, the City Board continued the state of emergency for the city.

In another hurricane-related matter discussed at the meeting, John Harrison of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency introduced himself as a representative of the agency.

Mayor Laurence Leyens said his main concern is whether the city will be reimbursed for emergency expenses.

Harrison said he could not tell him that, but he would try to put the city in contact with someone who could.