Surviving Our First Hurricane

For the past few days I had been diligently watching the news.  The local meteorologists were tracking a hurricane that was supposed to make landfall on the gulf side of Florida this week.  I became anxious about what we would do in case it became the category five that they had predicted.  Thankfully, the weathermen gave a lot of advice.  One even had a catch phrase of "Don't panic until I panic!"  The news stories really helped us get ready.  We bought non-perishable food for a couple of days and an extra case of water.  I made sure that the portable generator was charged and Doug brought in the patio furniture.  

Marion county was under a state of emergency starting on Tuesday as we were in the predicted storm path.  Doug's company closed early so that those in unstable homes could find a safe place to live for the next few days.  Thankfully, all of the local shelters were open for those in need.  All we had left to do was wait and enjoy a "visitor" who stopped by on our back patio.  I assumed it was getting ready for the storm as well.

The storm hit late in the evening, well past midnight.  The eye first made landfall about fifty miles from here.  The hurricane then traveled north up the gulf to Big Bend creating strong storm surges and damaging everything in its past.  The worst of it hit hardest at Cedar Key destroying buildings, cars and homes.  Even though it was only a category three, the destruction was major.  It had hit areas that hadn't seen a hurricane in over one hundred years.  

Thankfully, Ocala did not have too much damage.  We were awakened twice by tornado warnings in the middle of the night.  I really appreciated that the Orlando news station followed the path on television giving exact locations of the wind speeds and high damage areas.  They even showed the exact streets that the tornado was traveling over.  Once it passed by Majestic Oaks, I headed back to bed.  

All storm warnings were over by 3 p.m. on Wednesday.  We were very grateful to have never lost power.  Doug was able to work from home most of the day.  He actually got a lot done as the only other people working were in the Elkhart office, so he didn't have a lot of meetings.  Doug and I decided to head to Walmart late in the afternoon to pick up a few things.  I think that we were really just interested in getting out of the house for awhile.  We definitely did not see the damage that was on the news.  North of us had been hit hard with high winds and flooding.  We only saw a few branches down on the trees.  The strange part to us was that everything was still closed.  The state of emergency had been lifted hours before, but even Walmart was closed.  Thankfully, Hungry Howies was open, making for a fun dinner for us and a walk down memory lane as it was our go to pizza place when we lived in Naperville almost thirty years ago.  It was an awesome way to celebrate surviving our first hurricane.