hi everyone
we arrived back on sunday from our maiden stay at our new home on rotonda. the 2 weeks was not a breeze(pardon the pun) by any stretchbof the imagination. we were a party of 5 made up of my wife gill, 89 year old mother kath, travelling friends andy and anna and myself. andy and anna's virgin flight was delayed by some 6 hours and consequently they missed their connections in new york, and thus arrived a day late. an omen maybe??
the weather for the first week was terrible but our new home was wonderful, so we were in good spirits, mostly gin and spiced rum actually.
during the first weekend my mother had a fall during the night and was very weak for a couple of days and needed a lot of attention. she had another fall agian during the night and we were in for a few days of nursing and positivity to ensure we made it throuigh to the flight home.
AND THEN.......
along came charley.
we were glued to the tv along with thousands of others watching the minute by minute coverage of the hurricanes changes in direction and upgrading of category. andy and anna decided to go home a day early from fort myers and i drove them there on thursday morning. that was unpleasant enough.
that night i didn't sleep a wink thinking about all the different scenarios facing the 3 of us. during the night there was a bad thunderstorm which i thought might be the early arrival of charley, naive or what??
the next morning we had decided to stay put and told our mc exactly that. our choices seemed to be
1 drive to sarasota airport and check in to a loocal hotel...no rooms.
2 drive to one of the shelters mentioned as abailable in the port charlotte area
3 stay put and cross our fingers.
at about 9.30 am the tv guy sdaid that all low lying areas with flood insurance premiums should evacuate immediately as the hurricane was being upgraded to a 3 and the storm surge from the gulf could be as high as 15ft.
you've guessed it, we bottled it and got our stuff together and made straight for.....port charlotte!!
our first port of call was a shelter at an elementary school called Liberty, hmmm!
this place was a school dining hall with a series of lonf thin benches and people had brought their own pillows, blankets etc etc
the sheriff told us about a special needs shelter 2 or 3 miles away which might be able to take my mother. we drove there like mad things and just made it after a lengthy check in process(fair enough).
the place was church hall. not like english church halls but more like a sports hall and designed as a hurricane shelter with all the necessary shutters etc etc
it was packed out and beds were only for the special needs not there carers, but we felt so much better. the hurricane arrived late afternoon, time seemed to be in a kind of limbo, weird. the roof started to shake and water started to pour through the ceiling in a number of places, one of the doors was about to blow and this apparently would have caused the roof to go due to the pressure if on e of the resident fire dept guys hadn't found the vent to open.
charley was right over the top of us and the eye gave us a coyulple of minutes respite when loads of the olfd folk thought it had finished only for the winds to attack the other side of the building.
everywhere people were praying and that actually didn't do a lot for my confidence.
eventually it passed on by and we all settled down to try and rest. at 3am we were shocked to hear that the building would have to be evacuated as it was now deemed to be unsafe!! so the most elderly and infirm,not my mum, were taken in a convoy of yellow school buses to sarasota which had been largely unscathed (typical i thought!). we were not allowed to leave until 6.45am as it was thought to be too dangerous to drive in the dark and possibly cause more problems for the emergency services.
i'll stop here and just thank someone that we are all home safely. we still don't know a bout our gorgeous brand new gulf coast/golf course home. the mc has said superficial damage and that's all i've had.
we have been
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