Our first Hurricane: Frances will hit us
on Sunday morning. Miami Beach is being evacuated. We also have
to leave. We will be staying at a friend in Coral Gables.
and as due to evacuation I won't be able
to give a video live feed from our appartement here are some webcams
Miami
Webcams
Here is the blog:
Sunday morning,
the hurricane is gone. The evacuation of South is only in effect
until 10am. We are allowed to go back home. The clouds are moving
in exactly the oposite direction. Still very fast but coming from
south. We are very grateful that the hurricane missed us and that
we stayed with power all of the time. Still remembering the 2003
blackout in NYC, being without electricity for a longer period of
time is really unpleasant. Well Ivan is on his way so we might have
another hurricane weekend next week.
Saturday 7pm,
we went out to do some shopping. There are actually a few small
stores that stayed open. The Cuban food was amazing.
Saturday 4pm,
finally it has gotten a little windy. We are using the dog to measure
the strength of the wind. But whenever people are calling we still
have to howl ourselves and make up wind noise.
Saturday
1pm, only slight rain outside. The wireless lan connection to my
neighbors is bad. Sorry if the upload of my homepage should be incomplete.
I will keep trying to get it all through.
Saturday morning,
seems this hurricane was named wrong. Godot would have been the
right name. We evacuated 27 hours after mendatory evacuation started.
Looks like we could have spent another night at home and maybe evacuate
Saturday evening. If at all. I took some nice pictures of deserted
Miami Beach. Hope I can put them up soon. When taking pictures at
night while walking the dog I had to tell my friends: Pretend it
is windy. We had fun. How nice. The neighbors have wireless lan.
I just have to sit close to the wall :-)
Friday 4:30pm,
the friends where we wanted to go to are already out of electricity.
So we are replanning and will go to another friend, also in Coral
Gables. Right now we are having a little storm and rain outside
so we are waiting for that to pass so we can finally evacuate.
Friday 2pm,
we had like 10 mins of heavy rain and heavy winds. Now the sun is
shining, no wind, everything looks beautiful. But on the dopplar
radar we can see the first stormy waves approaching so we will evacuate
now. We just don't know a save place for Volvochen yet. I will try
to update here as soon as I get an internet connection somewhere...
Friday morning,
all TV channels are only reporting about the hurricane. I just walked
out. It is very quiet and calm outside. Almost no wind. Very nice
weather. Maybe we should go to the beach before we evacuate. Hurricane
is a little bit delayed it seems so we are not hurrying with packing.
Claudinha and Jorge wrote. Their flight got of course cancelled.
I guess Miami airport is closed from this afternoon on.
Thursday, 4pm,
the wind is picking up. We stocked up on water and cookies. Fueled
up Volvochen.There are long lines at gas stations. Some gas stations
are already out of gas. All toll roads are free of charge.Long lines
in grocerie stores. The only water left in the shelves. Perrier
for $2 per liter. I hope I will manage to run out and take some
more pictures in Miami Beach. We have to start securing all our
nice toys, computers, Tivo... trying to put everything as high as
possible in case our place gets flooded. We have decided we will
leave our appartement tomorrow in the morning and head out to a
friends house in Coral Gables. So guess no more blog then. But I
will update as soon as possible.
Thursday, noon,
mendatory evacuation of Miami Beach starting 4 pm today. So guess
I won't be able to report all the way life trough this storm. We
are going out now to do our emergency shopping. Later to the beach.
Wednesday, September
1st, 6:30 pm They tell Patricia that work will close for the next
2 days. Don't come back till Tuesday. In Germany they would call
it "Hurricanfrei"
Our friends Claudinha and Jorge are supposed to arrive Saturday
morning from Brazil. I guess their flight is very questionable.
Latest news say that 300.000 people are being evacuated. But there
is still a good chance that the hurricane will turn and head north.
It has done it in the past. Come back often for updates, hopefully
some pics and maybe a life webcast via yahoo messenger...
