We live along the intracoastal waterway in Florida and Hurricane Matthew had just torn up the Bahamas! Our first instincts were to secure the house and get the heck out of there. Of course, we couldn’t leave our precious camper in the path of this monster. Since our little hotel on wheels could take us anywhere we wanted to go, we packed the camper full of clothing, valuables, as much food as we could save from our fridge, our young adult daughter, and 3 cats. Then, we set out in a caravan (can’t leave the vehicles behind) to the safety of the middle of the state. Oh how fun!
After spending a day and a half pulling everything in from outside, shuttering the windows and doors, and picking everything up off the floor on the lower level, we now had to sit in traffic for 3 hours to travel 1 hour away. Once there, we set up camp. Watching the news made us wonder if we were far enough to be safe in a little metal box, especially with those big beautiful oak trees hanging above the camper. To play it safe, we got a room at the lodge in this particular campground for the night that the storm actually hit. So, we loaded a smaller set of clothing, valuables, and food (along with the 3 cats) into the car and then from the car to the lodge. The evening news predicted lots of flooding back home. We had done everything we could at that point and could only wait and hope. In the morning, we found our campground to have not much more than twigs, moss, and palm fronds scattered around. All we needed now, was to find out how we fared back home. So, we loaded our things (and the cats) back into the car to take back to the camper, then wait until we could contact someone back home.
By mid-day we discovered that our home had not flooded (hurray!), but a large tree had come down blocking the road into our neighborhood and taking down a power line. So, why not stay another night and hope power came back by the next day?
After 4 days of prepping, packing, unpacking, packing, unpacking, and STRESS, we took our last evening to enjoy ourselves a bit before heading home. We got wood from the general store and made a fire. I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt to kick back and relax by the fire that night! We felt the stress of the week melt away and were able to enjoy the beautiful evening.
The next morning, I made a nice breakfast outside before packing up to head back to reality.
Back home, we discovered we’d had about 6 inches of dirty seawater in the garage. But, thankfully, none of it got into the house. The photo above shows someone’s sailboat laying sideways on an island across from the house. Hopefully it wasn’t too damaged. All in all, we really dodged a bullet with this storm. The people to the north on St Augustine, Jacksonville, and North Carolina, not to mrmention the Bahamas and Haiti weren’t so lucky though. Our prayers are with them as they recover.
This time we really did “run away camping”!
