Is Our Anniversary Cursed?
I mentioned the other day that rmy anniversary with Hawk was about a week ago. Often we travel to celebrate our anniversary. This year we took our anniversary trip early, visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and North Carolina at the start of September. It's good that we took that trip then, because if we'd traveled the week of our anniversary we'd have been hit by Hurricane Helene pummeling western North Carolina. Boone, the town we stayed in for 5 nights, was among the towns that suffered severe damage. Floods washed out at least one of the main roads into and out of town.
This isn't the first time that violent weather has hit places we've traveled for our anniversary. Two years ago we made a short trip to Florida's Gulf Coast for our anniversary. Thunderstorms on the trip out there caused flight diversions and multi-hour delays that stranded us overnight at Midway airport. Even the next morning with clear skies we had to rearrange flights to land a 3 hour drive from our destination. And our suitcase landed at yet-another airport, 24 hours later.
We had a nice few days after that... until Hurricane Ian started bearing down on the area as we were wrapping things up! Our last day there, locals warned us there were lines for gas all the stores were selling out of basics like milk and bread. Hawk got out okay the next morning, but I was staying on in Florida to staff my company's trade show. By the following morning, the whole show had been canceled and my explicit instructions from my VP were "Get out ASAP. Do whatever it takes." By then flights out of Orlando were already sold out for the day. Rather than chance it staying another day or two- the airport wound up closing the next day at noon- I found a flight at Jacksonville, 170 miles away, and rented a car to drive there.
These aren't the only cases where a bad storm or even a hurricane has struck a place around the time of our anniversary. Another memorable one was when we getting ready to move out of North Carolina after I finished my graduate studies. Hurricane Fran made landfall on the NC coast and took an improbable path toward the Triangle, hitting the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The community I lived in was spared damage, but many of my friends and colleagues lost power and face boil-water advisories for several days.
This isn't the first time that violent weather has hit places we've traveled for our anniversary. Two years ago we made a short trip to Florida's Gulf Coast for our anniversary. Thunderstorms on the trip out there caused flight diversions and multi-hour delays that stranded us overnight at Midway airport. Even the next morning with clear skies we had to rearrange flights to land a 3 hour drive from our destination. And our suitcase landed at yet-another airport, 24 hours later.
We had a nice few days after that... until Hurricane Ian started bearing down on the area as we were wrapping things up! Our last day there, locals warned us there were lines for gas all the stores were selling out of basics like milk and bread. Hawk got out okay the next morning, but I was staying on in Florida to staff my company's trade show. By the following morning, the whole show had been canceled and my explicit instructions from my VP were "Get out ASAP. Do whatever it takes." By then flights out of Orlando were already sold out for the day. Rather than chance it staying another day or two- the airport wound up closing the next day at noon- I found a flight at Jacksonville, 170 miles away, and rented a car to drive there.
These aren't the only cases where a bad storm or even a hurricane has struck a place around the time of our anniversary. Another memorable one was when we getting ready to move out of North Carolina after I finished my graduate studies. Hurricane Fran made landfall on the NC coast and took an improbable path toward the Triangle, hitting the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The community I lived in was spared damage, but many of my friends and colleagues lost power and face boil-water advisories for several days.