We survived our first hurricane & a Linkup

Hurricane Sally

Well, we survived our first hurricane.  I touched base on this a little bit in my post on Thursday, however, more unfolded since that post.  First and foremost, thank you to everyone who reached out to check on me.  This was our first hurricane here in Florida.  While both my fiance and I made it through Hurricane Sandy in Jersey several years ago, we really didn’t know what to expect here.

If you read my post on Thursday you know about the first day, but I’ll do a quick recap.  It started to storm in the morning on Tuesday, and because the power was flickering, I decided to take Lilly and Zero with me to our store.  About halfway there, I had to pull over because of how bad the rain was.  That’s when I called my fiance and we decided that we were going to close the store for the day.  It was raining and windy, but nothing out of the ordinary with normal storms here.  We decided just in case, we were going to close the store Wednesday, but my fiance was going to go to our auto shop and stay open for half a day, along with packing up our products at our CBD store.

Flooding and collapsed highways

On Wednesday morning I got a call from my fiance that he is coming home earlier than expected because it was pretty bad in the town where our businesses are.  That’s when I realized that our power was out.  I called him back and let him know, which is when he let me know he couldn’t get home, they closed the only highway that leads to our house.  But wait, there’s more!

I went outside and noticed that our backyard was starting to have a little bit of flooding.  Then I looked at my neighbor’s yard and there was what looked like a river going through her backyard.  It took my fiance a few hours to get home because he had to go north towards Alabama and find a way to get to our house from the opposite side.  We found out later that it was because part of the highway on the way to our house collapsed.

The Aftermath

We were stuck at home with no power (I decided to read near candles and my little lantern lol), but thankfully we didn’t have any damage to the house, and it wasn’t that hot outside so it wasn’t unbearable, just inconvenient.  The following day (Thursday) I took Lilly and Zero with me to the store because we still didn’t have power and just in case it got too hot in the house, I didn’t want them to overheat.  My fiance was able to find a generator earlier in the day after going to multiple different places.  We did have some damage to our store, but thankfully our product was fine.  Once I got home Thursday, I realized that we did have power back and my neighbor told us that it was turned on at 6pm (I got home at 6:45), so while we didn’t need the generator anymore, we decided to keep it for any future hurricanes.

We didn’t get hit anywhere near as bad as Pensacola and a few areas around us were worse than others.

I would say we got lucky for sure.  However, I would be lying if I were to say that I wasn’t stressed out.  Those few days really had me nervous.  Especially when my fiance said he couldn’t make it home as fast as he would’ve hoped.  I mean, I know him, and he would’ve found a way regardless, but it was still stressful.

As I said earlier, I do want to thank every single person who reached out and checked on me.  Not only was it appreciated, but it truly helped ease my mind a bit.  Anyway, let’s move on to the linkup!