Fleeing OBX

The other sad part was that our vacation was cut short by lousy Hurricane Earl. We knew the hurricane was coming. It was the topic of interest at the house the whole time we were there. We watched all of the reports and projections and hoped against hope that we would not be affected by the impending storm.

By Wednesday, they had evacuated the lower part of the OBX by Hatteras. It looked like the storm would really only graze the upper part, Currituck County, where we were staying. So we were hoping that we wouldn't get the evacuation order. On Thursday morning at 6:30am, Dare County, just south of us was evacuated. Then at 8:30am on Thursday we got a mandatory evacuation notice. So we started packing up.

The weather was still perfect on Thursday morning, nothing to indicate that a storm was on its way. So while Leah napped, I sent Matt and the girls to swim in our pool while I packed. This is how I found the big kids and the dads when I took a break from packing. You can tell they were really concerned about the impending storm and mandatory evacuation order.
As is evident, we took our time getting ready to go and finally were ready to leave at 1pm. And that is when the evacuation became miserable. We got no further than .6 miles when we hit a standstill. That's right a huge long line of cars going absolutely nowhere. We didn't move for an hour. It was absolutely ridiculous. Everyone out of their cars, playing duck, duck, goose, feeding their dogs, etc. Crazy.

Here's Ellie waiting in the car, checking out the driver's seat.
Annie chilling in the car. You can see our supply of chips that promised to get us through behind her.

Matt and Leah hanging out on the side of the road. And finally, the long, long line of cars.

I am surprised the girls did as well as they did. At this point, we were teetering as to whether to continue home or to go back to the beach house. We wondered whether it wouldn't be better to just wait out the storm. But we did finally start moving.

In the end, we decided that it was too risky to stay. Yes, it's possible that everything would be fine. We could stay and still have power and the road may not flood and we could leave on Saturday like we had planned. But we wouldn't really enjoy the beach on Friday because of the storm and we needed to leave early on Saturday, so why stay? And, what if the worst happened, the storm was really bad, power was knocked out, the house was damaged, we were hurt etc.

So we left. And with the incredible nasty traffic, it took us three hours to go the 20 miles to get us off the outerbanks. Yuck! We stopped in Norfolk for two hours to eat dinner because I was tired of being in the car and I wanted the kids to get a break.

Then we hit the road again, with pretty good traffic until we hit construction traffic on I-95 just south of our house. What a nasty welcome home. We finally got home at 11pm, a full 10 hours after we had left our beach house. What a nightmare.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have still decided to leave, but I would have left at 7pm. By that time, everyone that was leaving was gone and everyone that was staying was inside. We probably wouldn't have had nearly as bad of traffic and we could have enjoyed the afternoon swimming at the pool instead of languishing in the car. Oh well, there's always a woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Despite all that, the vacation was still fantastic. I find myself laughing as I tell people about the two major mishaps we ensured - Hurricane Earl & Annie's stitches - and then try to convince them that we indeed had a wonderful time and can't wait to go again. I sound ridiculous. But it's true. It was a great vacation and I am counting the days til I can get down there again.