30 Hours

Ike was not very nice to us. We got up Sunday morning and went to Church. Then we went to a neighboring town to a Chinese restaurant with our friends, who are also our neighbors. We rode with them in their new SUV. The food was wonderful, as usual, and we stuffed ourselves.

The wind was horrible on our way home and we had not gone very far, when the there was a large jolt and everything got dark inside the SUV. All we could see was leaves through all of our windows. We continued to roll forward and stopped once we could see daylight again and everyone but me jumped out of the car to see what had happened.

I just turned around in my seat and looked at the tree or very large limb from a tree, that had barely missed crushing us. Then being the pessimist that I am, I looked at the other trees nearby that were presently and violently bending over the top of where I sat and I wished everyone else would just come to their senses and get back in the car and drive on down the road.

My strong anxious feelings must have telepathically conveyed themselves to the others because all of the sudden, they all quickly moved back to their former positions and we sped off to the nearest parking lot where there were no trees. A careful inspection of the SUV revealed no damage other than the driver's side mirror had broken loose from it's housing.

We continued on towards home and the wind continued to harass us all of the way. Being the pessimist that I am, I made the statement that I hoped that we could get home once we got back on country roads. Well, the first tree across the road that we came to, once we turned on to the country road that takes us to our houses, was movable by the two men in suits who were my Husband and our friend. The next tree required two chainsaws and a few good neighbors, plus a road crew.

When we were finally almost to the neighbor's driveway, we had to drive across phone lines that were lying across the road. That is when we knew for sure that we were in trouble. We did have a phone when we arrived home, surprisingly enough, but we had no electricity. We are just simple folks, living in the outer rim of civilization, so when we don't have electricity, we also don't have water because we have a well with an electric pump.

We started hearing the rumors that it might be 4 or 5 days before we were back to normal. In the meantime we started adjusting our lives, the swimming pool came in handy for water to wash things in and to flush the stool with. We went to bed last night thinking that it would be back on by morning, but that didn't happen. We suffered with no electricity for 30 hours. It finally came back on late this evening and I had 85 emails waiting for me when I booted up the computer.