Surviving

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  No power sort of has that affect.  Last week we survived a 5.8 earthquake and Hurricane Irene.  Luckily, neither one was nearly the disaster it could have been.  New York City escaped the storm, but unfortunately we listened to the experts and traveled upstate where there was tons of damage.  (Apparently others had the same idea.  We saw people in NYC taxi cabs and limos hours outside of the city.)

It started out as a beautiful Saturday finally christening the beer pong table and mixing up festive hurricanes.

That quickly changed.  The wind and rain were constant for over 24 hours.  Power lines were no match for 70 mph wind gusts and sheets of rain.  We have some great neighbors who came over to check on us and invite us over for chili - that's something that never happens in the city.  But after blackjack, Cowboyopoly, listening to satellite radio, and songs on itunes like Bob Dylan's Hurricane and Dexy's Midnight Runners' Come on Eileen got old, we decided to venture out into the storm and head back to the city.  We couldn't take the usual route down the mountain because of downed trees and dangling power lines.  But we flagged down an old mountain man and asked if he knew a different route to the highway.  The scruffy veteran looked like a villain from Scooby Doo cartoons, but he showed us a winding dirt road that would get us out of town.  The ride was straight out of a scary movie, complete with freaky trailer homes and a swollen river that looked like it was about to jump the bank and sweep us away at any minute.   But in the end, we reached the highway and headed home.

But we didn't get far.  The highway was closed due to flooding well outside of the city.  We were forced to exit the highway and get a random hotel room in a small rural town.  The only vacant hotel still hadn't been cleaned from the previous guests, so we changed our own sheets.  (Now that's surviving!)  We were a bit alarmed when a siren starting blaring in the middle of the night - where I'm from that means a tornado - but the clerk at the front desk said not to worry it was just the fire department.  Note to small town fire departments - change the sound of your siren!  Are those noises not universal?!  

The drive home the next day was uneventful even thought the mountain sides looked like waterfalls, there were pools of water everywhere and evidence of rock slides and erosion.  We got back to the city safe and in time to still hear about how the storm pretty much missed the city and everyone just partied at bars and sat in the air conditioning.  Next time, we might just have our hurricane party in the city, not the sticks.

(Sorry, I didn't take any storm pictures, I was too worried about finding a dry route home).