Hurricanes

In honor of hurricane season, I thought I'd talk about my experience with mother nature. First off, do I have any readers in Texas? I hope you guys made it though Ike okay. I know that Don got a call from JJOK last night and he was about to embark on his journey back home to take care of the always fun cleaning up and re-bulding portion - the dreaded aftermath. Good luck JJ!!

I moved to South Florida back in May 2004. I had heard about hurricanes and saw the crazy images that came across the weather channel, but it never really occured to me that I'd be living in hurricane central. In fact, I think South Florida hadn't had any major hurricanes since like Andrew which was quite a while ago. I was just picturing sunny skies, sandy beaches, beautiful blue water and tanned hot surfers. woo hoo! I coudln't get out of Maryland quick enough.

So, the first year a few small hurricanes came through. I remember being kind of excited. It was big news! Everyone kept saying "this is so unusual - we barely ever have any hurricane's here". I started to not believe them because I had already been there through Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Francis and now Hurricane Ivan was heading our way. I was living close enough to the beach that I could walk there. I parked my car at the bridge that went over the inlet and I walked to the water so that I could see the HUGE waves and of course there were some brave surfers out there trying to catch some good waves and it was fun!

I went back to the halfway house where I was living and I had my apartment fully stocked with bottled water and flashlights and candles and food! We had been hearing about this storm for days, so we were fully prepared. My work shut down and I was basically just looking at this as a little vacation! I had a battery powered radio and me and the rest of my friends sat outside for as long as possible until we absolutely had to go inside. The rain started picking up and the wind was blowing really hard and the doors were practically flying off the hinges. Eventually we lost power and that's when the fun really began. Trees started falling down all around my car. The T.V. was gone, the air conditioning had ceased. There was no more hot water and all of a sudden it wasn't as fun as I thought it was going to be.


It was a pretty small storm, it ended after a few short hours and since I lived in a pretty major road, my power was restored in about a day or two.

Photos from Hurricane Ivan...









There were definitely some parts of Florida that were hit harder during Ivan, but I fared pretty well and was very lucky.

I wouldn't be so fortunate the next year.

I moved in with Don about a year later (in 2005). He lived right down the street from where I used to live, but his house was on a smaller street and he was a lot closer to beach. No major businesses were on this street so if there was a hurricane, he was one of the last houses to get his power restored.

Hurricane Katrina had just passed us by and hit New Orleans in a MAJOR WAY.

Hurricane Wilma was approaching South Florida, but I didn't take it very seriously.

To be continued...