On Hurricanes and Driving to New York
Mmmmkay..... catch-up time for friendly flowers. In the beginning of September, Elisa, Ellen and I found ourselves on the road to the Drop Dead festival in New York as Hurricane Frances closed in behind us. We had plane tickets, but all outgoing flights were cancelled of course, and so we drove to the west coast of the Florida peninsula and then north to avoid the flood of evacuees from the east. Still, there were places where we encountered bad traffic, and it took us 33 hours to reach New York! We shaved 10 hours off the drive time on the way back from Drop Dead, but encountered the hurricane as it was coming up and had to make a decision to either bed down in Georgia and let it pass over us, or take a chance and try to skirt the edge of the massive storm on the way down. We decided to take the chance.
It turned out to be the right decision, and I think if we had stayed we may have been stranded. As it was, it was terribly eerie driving for several hours down the length of Florida with everything in darkness. Five million people were out of power. Mobile phones weren't working, and the local radio travel advisories were off the air, though we'd heard that a section of the main highway had been swallowed up by a sinkhole. We even ran into a military checkpoint at one point, as the army had been called in to help with the catastrophe. There was no where to get gas, but I'd filled a large can before we left, and luckily that was just enough to get us through the final stretch home.
And then Ivan was coming. Bloody Bolshevik bastard. A news report stated matter-of-factly that the only reason this hurricane was rated a Category 5 was because Category 6 has never been defined. Sustained winds were 165 miles per hour (266 km/hr) with gusts up to 210 mph (338 kph). The central eye was a maelstrom of constant lightning activity. In other words, a monster of almost unimaginable destructive power.
We sealed up the house, bought what supplies we could, and stayed tuned to the news in case we were ordered to evacuate. As it turned out, this one thankfully missed us, but it may be very bad for the states bordering the north end of the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans was particularly in danger, because that city lies 15 feet below sea level.
At the time, I was really not liking Florida, not that I'd ever particularly started. I'd mentioned before that I'd like to live somewhere where palm trees would die, but I didn't mean because they'd been forcefully ripped from the earth (erm, sand) by 200 mile per hour winds and then reduced to ash in the daemoniacally frenzied eye of lightning of some vaguely Russian-named storm. No, Ivan was not my friend. Not even a little bit.
Soooo.... anyway. The weather's looking up much more so now. The skies here are very pretty. To date, Ellen has not engaged in hand-to-claw combat with a raccoon yet, but that's an oversight we intend to correct!
It turned out to be the right decision, and I think if we had stayed we may have been stranded. As it was, it was terribly eerie driving for several hours down the length of Florida with everything in darkness. Five million people were out of power. Mobile phones weren't working, and the local radio travel advisories were off the air, though we'd heard that a section of the main highway had been swallowed up by a sinkhole. We even ran into a military checkpoint at one point, as the army had been called in to help with the catastrophe. There was no where to get gas, but I'd filled a large can before we left, and luckily that was just enough to get us through the final stretch home.
And then Ivan was coming. Bloody Bolshevik bastard. A news report stated matter-of-factly that the only reason this hurricane was rated a Category 5 was because Category 6 has never been defined. Sustained winds were 165 miles per hour (266 km/hr) with gusts up to 210 mph (338 kph). The central eye was a maelstrom of constant lightning activity. In other words, a monster of almost unimaginable destructive power.
We sealed up the house, bought what supplies we could, and stayed tuned to the news in case we were ordered to evacuate. As it turned out, this one thankfully missed us, but it may be very bad for the states bordering the north end of the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans was particularly in danger, because that city lies 15 feet below sea level.
At the time, I was really not liking Florida, not that I'd ever particularly started. I'd mentioned before that I'd like to live somewhere where palm trees would die, but I didn't mean because they'd been forcefully ripped from the earth (erm, sand) by 200 mile per hour winds and then reduced to ash in the daemoniacally frenzied eye of lightning of some vaguely Russian-named storm. No, Ivan was not my friend. Not even a little bit.
Soooo.... anyway. The weather's looking up much more so now. The skies here are very pretty. To date, Ellen has not engaged in hand-to-claw combat with a raccoon yet, but that's an oversight we intend to correct!