SABINE PASS, Texas -- She lost her house to Hurricane Rita three years ago. She rode out Hurricane Humberto last year in a small travel trailer. This time, Julie Patin wasn’t taking any chances.

As the once powerful Hurricane Gustav marched into the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, she and her family boarded up their house and headed for Baytown, a Houston suburb. But by Monday, as the storm weakened to a Category 2 when it struck land near Cocodrie, La., Patin figured it was safe to come home.

“I’m moving back in,” Patin said with a smile as she, her son, and two nephews prepared to unload a pair of pickup trucks stacked with belongings. “They said it wasn’t going to get that bad here.”

Most of Patin’s neighborhood, which suffered massive damage during Hurricane Rita, remained under a mandatory evacuation order on Monday, but she said friends and neighbors were also headed back to town.

Emergency officials urged residents to stay put and let Gustav move through the area.

“We’re asking people if you are out of town, stay there,” said Crystal Holmes, spokeswoman for the Southeast Texas Emergency Management Office. “We just don’t know at this point if what we are going to get is going to damage us.”

But Patin and other families like hers weren’t listening.

Her family kept plywood across the windows of the house, a prefabricated home rated to withstand a Category 2 storm and raised several feet off the ground to avoid flooding, and planned to ride out what is expected to be a day filled with tropical storm-force winds and rain.

“If it gets too bad on the lights, we’ll just move to the travel trailer,” Patin said of a potential power failure.

About 6,000 people were bused to shelters as far away as Texarkana under a mandatory evacuations order, Holmes said.  Thousands of others left on their own.

Evacuees in East Texas shelters in Texarkana may have to pick up and move again, as forecasters are calling for up to a foot of rain in that region if Gustav stalls as expected.

Just up the road from Patin’s house, near a series of refineries, several people who ignored evacuation orders spent the quiet morning fishing under graying skies and a growing wind.

“I watched it on the news and they said it was going the other way and I decided to come fishing,” Bernard Simon, 55, said as he cast his raw shrimp bait into the brown choppy water of the intracoastal waterway.

His fishing buddy, Percy Kennedy, 65, said he didn’t have anything else to do. And besides, he said, as storms like Gustav churn hundreds of miles of the coast the fishing tends to get better.

“We’ve got to get some dinner to feed our families,” Kennedy joked as he watched Simon reel in another empty hook.

In nearby Port Arthur, the few residents who stayed took advantage of the cloudy skies and lower temperatures Monday to get some household chores done.

Robert and Audra Lacour, who live just up the road from Grant, spent their afternoon weeding a front yard garden.

“We decided this was the perfect opportunity for yard chores,” Audra Lacour said as she crawled through the garden. “As soon as this is done, I get to mulch and the rain will just pack it down.”

Like some of their neighbors, the Lacours said they were keeping a close eye on the weather, with a plan to leave at the last minute. Instead, when the storm weakened on Sunday, they called Audra Lacour’s mom and told her to head back into town.

“She was real happy. We probably saved her a tank of gas” and a night in a shelter, Audra Lacour said.