We survived the hurricane!

Wow it's been a while!  We've been going nonstop since my last post, with two cruises, Thanksgiving, and a Christmas party out of town...more on those later.  I just realized that my last post left us preparing for the hurricane, so it kind of looks like we didn't survive it...we did!

As I mentioned in the last post, we were fortunate to make it to our next park (Sunshine Holiday Daytona) and set up before the rain hit.  In retrospect we were quite fortunate that our Moss Park reservation had been cancelled, as it left us with just a 30 minute drive in the growing wind and rain instead of a 1.5 hour drive.  We were also fortunate that we moved on the day we did, as Sunshine Holiday Daytona was closing their office that afternoon and not reopening until the storm passed (meaning: if we had delayed moving just one day we wouldn't have been able to check in and would have been 'homeless').  Finally, as the hurricane approached, the park we HAD been at (Rose Bay) came under a mandatory evacuation order, so if we had still been there we would have had to evacuate with the RV in intense winds on the interstate or abandon the RV to the park (which did end up flooding) as we escaped in the car.  We're feeling very blessed that things worked out the way they did...all these things combined to give us a safe way to get to a safe place to sit out the hurricane.

The calm before the storm!

The hurricane itself was much less stressful than I anticipated.  We kept our slides pulled in (partially because the slide seals don't deal well with driving rain while the slides are out, but mostly to make sure the slide covers, including the one we just replaced, didn't catch and rip in the wind) and stayed put.  The bedroom slide is out in the photo because I was gathering clothes to set out for the next few days - our bedroom cabinets and drawers are difficult to impossible to open with the slide pulled in.  The RV did rock a little bit in the intense wind, but never to the point we were worried about tipping over, and the wind didn't pick up anything that could become a projectile (though several palm fronds did fall straight down).  We were parked right next to the community center in the RV park, which provided a bit of a wind break, so we considered that fortunate as well.

Here is my feeble attempt to capture the wind and rain as viewed from my nice warm dry sofa inside the RV.

Aaron took a couple of screenshots from his weather app to document our experience.

Right after the hurricane we left the RV at Sunshine Holiday Daytona (which was distinctly NOT sunny) and went on a cruise!  More on that in the next post.