An Evacuation Vacation ... Sort of

A week after the most powerful hurricane in Atlantic history finally made landfall on our state, the dust has settled and much of the debris has been cleared. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but Hurricane Irma gave the Maleys a hefty dose of stress, anxiety, overeating and adventure.

Early last week, as Irma set her sights on our state, I decided it was a good idea to make reservations out of town, should things go pear shaped by the weekend. Since landfall was originally expected much earlier, I’d marked Thursday night as the point of no return. If Friday’s morning forecast had grown more ominous, it seemed likely that our limited northward highway arteries would quickly grow overwhelmed.

By Tuesday morning, however, making hotel reservations had already become a difficult enterprise. A close friend had offered her home on Skidaway Island, near Savannah, but the storm was tracking up the East Coast at the time, so low-country seemed like a dangerous bet. However, there were already few rooms available along the I-75 corridor from Valdosta to Atlanta and flights, which lacked the convenience of a cancel option, had grown cost-prohibitive anyway.

Figuring it would be best to get off of what would likely be a heavily-strained I-75 and head west as early as possible, I started looking for rooms in western Georgia. Hotels.com has a neat map search feature, in which lodging facilities are noted by either green or red dots, indicating whether or not vacancies are available as you scroll along. However, the rooms were booking so fast, that I’d pressed "book now" on several options, only to get a screen telling me the last room had been booked in the interim.

I wasn’t paying attention to how far west I’d scrolled when I finally scored a room at a Red Roof Inn in Montgomery, AL for Friday through Sunday. It offered free cancellation up until Thursday evening, so I booked it and considered it a cheap insurance policy, even if I had to eat the first night’s cost.

On Thursday night, I checked in with my ex-wife to see what her plans were and decide where our son (we share 50/50 custody) would be most secure through the weekend. She told me that he’d expressed a lot of anxiety over the possibility of being separated from either of his parents during what was then being described as one of the most potentially-dangerous hurricanes ever recorded, a storm that one meteorologist described as "testing the theoretical limit of how powerful we’d previously thought a hurricane could become."

We decided that I’d pick the both of them up in the middle of the night and we’d attempt to beat the rush north. I hadn’t even gassed up by that point, but was fortunate to score a full tank at the last station in west Bradenton that still had fuel, scoop them up in Lakewood Ranch, and then get on the road by 4 a.m. Though the interstate was much busier than one would have normally expected at that hour, we cruised northward at full-speed until we hit the spot where the turnpike merges onto I-75 and traffic came to a halt.

We crawled to Gainesville at a snail’s pace, where we jumped off for some coffee and ran into a few different people who’d left the day before and had spent 11-13 hours getting from the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area to the turnpike’s end. When we got back on, FDOT had opened the shoulders to traffic and we were able to move into Georgia at about a 30 mph average. We got off at the first opportunity and headed west on rural roads through beautiful scenery.

We made it to Montgomery in just under 13 hours and were greeted by a city that was eager to show its hospitality to evacuees. Upon check-in, we were offered free cases of water, invites to a cookout in the motel courtyard and even free tickets to the minor league baseball team’s playoff game that evening. Though I’d spent six months at Ft. McClellan when I was in the Army, I’d never been to Montgomery (aka the Gump) and was pleased to discover a beautiful city steeped in well-preserved history.

On Saturday, my son and I visited the Civil Rights Memorial and then traveled two blocks to the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis held court prior to the relocation of the Confederate capital to Richmond. It presented an excellent and timely opportunity to demonstrate the difference between a piece of history that has been rightfully preserved and a monument constructed to celebrate a worthy cause.

Then we headed over toward Troy University, where the Rosa Parks Museum and Library sits on the land where the legendary activist was famously arrested at a bus stop across from the still beautifully-preserved Davis Theatre. The museum offered discounted admission to Floridians, whom they told us had driven the day’s normal headcount of around three dozen to over 300. We topped the night off with some killer barbecue at Dreamland. It was so good we’d have to go back for one more meal, the night before we headed out.

Back at the motel, Florida plates filled the parking lot. We met an elderly couple from Naples, nervous when the storm was then expected to make landfall near their house, and scores of others from Ft. Myers, Miami/Dade and all points between. By late Saturday night, meteorologists were pretty certain the storm was now going to track westward toward us, rather than up the East Coast, but we were all relieved to learn that while it might keep us from getting out as early as we planned, Irma would not pose much of a threat by the time she rolled through Alabama.

Sunday was spent in nervous anticipation, communicating with friends and family who’d remained in Florida, flicking between the channels to get the latest updates, and hoping that things would be okay when we awoke Monday morning. Of course, our community fared about as well as could have possibly been expected in terms of missing the brunt of the storm’s intensity, and the overall damage was much less than most of us feared, especially at the point where landfall on Sarasota had been projected.

Technology proved vital, as local governments and Tallahassee were able to communicate quickly with citizens, coordinating evacuations and retreats to shelters, via internet, TV, Twitter and Facebook. A housebound, elderly neighbor who was on the county’s special needs list was out of minutes on his cell phone and unable to to receive the call he was expecting to coordinate a shuttle pick-up. While I wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone Friday night, within minutes, I discovered that I could use my Uber account to schedule a pick-up for him and less than an hour later, he was safe and sound in an east county middle school.

Other friends who’d sheltered at places like Manatee High, McNeal Elementary and Lakewood Ranch High, all reported that though the spaces were crowded to the halls in most instances, the school district, county employees and volunteers did an amazing job of keeping everyone calm and comfortable through three days of less than ideal circumstances. Facebook lit up with stories of people thanking friends, neighbors and strangers who’d helped them board up their windows, secure their pets and get themselves where they needed to be.

Businesses showed heart as well. Trader Joe’s gave away all of their bottled water, as did Treeumph and many more businesses I’m sure, while many data limits were waived on cell phone plans and hot spots opened up to anyone in order to make communication more accessible.

On our end, our 13 year-old son had the unexpected ancillary benefit of getting to take a rowdy and raucous road trip with both his mother and father. We’d divorced when he was just two and though we enjoy a very amicable co-parenting relationship, taking an impromptu vacation with just the two of us would have probably never happened had a chaotic and unpredictable woman named Irma not intervened. Had we imagined just how much it clearly meant to him, we probably would have done it sooner.

We woke at 2 a.m. Tuesday and plotted a course meant to miss the bulk of what would become a massive re-entry of millions of Floridians who’d evacuated over the course of a week, attempting to return home almost all at once. We successfully missed every major bottleneck, making unthinkable time as we cruised down mostly-barren rural roads, though we did nearly run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, after nearly three dozen stations were out of gas, power or both.

By 1 p.m., we’d finally made it home to find that our respective houses were largely intact and the power was still on. A few downed trees, some spoiled landscaping, missing shingles and an eviscerated carport roof was the sum total of the damage. Clearly, many people in our community and throughout the state fared much worse, and I’m grateful that we were spared meaningful consequences by an epic storm.

As I noted last week, I’d failed to evacuate during Hurricane Charley in 2004 and suffered some regrets when a different last-moment turn sent that one right toward our old house near Charlotte Harbor. This weekend earned me a long-overdue feeling of redemption and though it again proved to be nothing more than another close call, I learned my lesson well. When mother nature huffs, puffs and threatens to blow your town off the map, run like hell. There’s no such thing as a wasted evacuation.