I<\/span>n Florida, a baby\u2019s first word is likely to be hurricane, with a capital H. \u00a0It\u2019s that time of year again, and the season seems longer. So much so that I sometimes wonder if it will soon be conjoined with Christmas.<\/p>\n

When I was growing up, hurricanes meant nothing more than mystery, parties, and excitement. But that changed in September 1999 when Hurricane Floyd began threatening my barrier island real estate in Florida.<\/p>\n

It was a Monday night when Jacksonville\u2019s mayor ordered the beaches evacuated the following day.\u00a0 The bridges would be closed and no one allowed to return without a pass.\u00a0 By this time, my husband had already been on the phone for hours trying to find a motel room and had secured one at the Manor Inn, 240 miles away in Perry, GA.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d long since given up asking if they accepted pets.\u00a0 There wasn\u2019t a motel this side of the Mississippi that accepted pets.\u00a0 Why should we be the ones to burst their bubble!<\/p>\n

Sleep eluded me as I tried to calculate the really important things I could pack in our two- door sedan.\u00a0 My husband, our two cockatiels, Cappie, our cairn terrier, and Rhapsody, our sheltie, were givens.\u00a0 The rest: paper, pictures and panic.<\/p>\n

There weren\u2019t enough roads out of the beach to contain all the traffic\u2014reasonably anyway.\u00a0 It took us two and a half hours to leave the city limits of Jacksonville and seven hours more to reach the motel.\u00a0 The cairn, draped across my lap for all those hours clearly thought, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t get any better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n

People who hadn\u2019t called ahead for rooms stood in the lobby of the Manor Inn and cried.\u00a0 One very pregnant woman threatened to have her baby on the floor by the registration desk.\u00a0 The nearest vacancies were now in Alabama.<\/p>\n

As we made our way to our room, I understood fully the phrase, \u201cEverybody and his dog.\u201d Dogs arrived that had never seen the inside of a car, much less a motel room. There were cats, birds, an iguana, and a very impressive python.\u00a0 Some people even brought their children.<\/p>\n

When we\u2019d unpacked and dog-proofed the room (moving everything above the high water mark that the dogs might chew or pee on), I got the first hint of things to come.\u00a0 There was a loud splash and colorful exclamations from my husband.\u00a0 He\u2019d dropped the new travel alarm in the toilet.\u00a0 But any port in a storm.\u00a0 We put it on the bedside table and tried to forget where it\u2019d been a few minutes before.<\/p>\n

Did I mention that Rhapsody was in heat?\u00a0 That she\u2019s a BIG sheltie?\u00a0 Fastening her leash securely, I prepared to take her outside where she could spread the good word of her \u201ccondition.\u201d<\/p>\n

I opened the door just as a maid approached carrying a high stack of towels.\u00a0 Rhapsody lunged at this apparition, and towels sailed like cresting waves as the maid ran in the other direction.\u00a0 For goodness sake.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t like she was a python.<\/p>\n

We continued on our way, and when we reached the grass, I was relieved to see a fence between us and the male dog walking down the road.\u00a0 Have you ever seen a Weimaraner climb a chain link fence?\u00a0 That gave me some idea of just how desirable our Rhapsody had become.<\/p>\n

A few hours later, when my husband turned off the weather channel, I realized the two large dogs I\u2019d seen earlier were camping out on the balcony above our room.\u00a0 I can attest to the acuity of their hearing, vision and sense of smell.\u00a0 Nothing moved that they didn\u2019t know about.\u00a0 They barked, then our dogs barked.\u00a0 Our dogs barked and the dogs next door barked.\u00a0 At times the noise threatened to drown out the sound of the cricket who had set up housekeeping in our air vent.\u00a0 The night passed fitfully until 5 a.m. when, to our horror, the soggy alarm went off.<\/p>\n

<\/a>As the hours dragged by, we no longer felt safe in our room.\u00a0 We felt trapped, unable to get news of conditions at Jacksonville\u2019s beaches.\u00a0 By Wednesday evening, we\u2019d wrangled a number for the emergency line in Duval County.<\/p>\n

\u201cStay put,\u201d we were told. \u201cThere\u2019s a shortage of gas, and the bridges to the beaches won\u2019t open until late evening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thursday morning the soggy alarm finally succumbed, but I was awake by 5 a.m. anyway.\u00a0 I staggered to the lobby and waited drop by drop for a cup of coffee to brew.\u00a0 I took one grateful sip and made my way back to our room.\u00a0 Barely inside the door, I heard my husband yell to a dog \u201cGive me that sock!\u201d\u00a0 Numbly I watched a brown sock, tossed in the air, glide and dip, not unlike Forrest Gump\u2019s white feather.\u00a0 It came to rest in my precious cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

Floyd proved to be a mama\u2019s boy.\u00a0 He made a mess at our beaches but nothing a little sweat equity couldn\u2019t handle.\u00a0 Though he would be nothing compared to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he still left an enduring legacy that changed our lives.\u00a0 Today we drive a very large car with all the cargo space we can afford.\u00a0\u00a0 We even went so far as to build a second home in Georgia\u2014not that we have anything against the Manor Inn in Perry.<\/p>\n

A mama\u2019s boy?\u00a0 Never trust one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever seen a Weimaraner climb a chain link fence?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2144,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions\/2144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}