We Bring Hurricanes With Us...

Two weeks ago, Phillip was to work in Iowa City, Iowa. We decided to travel with him, thinking it would be a nice get-away for us. Morgan was going to be home 'manning the fort' and we were looking forward to our vacation (well, a vacation for Archie, Lawrence and myself!). We decided to break the stays up a bit by staying in what we thought was a really nice hotel...The Sheridan...the first two nights, then getting a cabin at The Palisades State Park for the next two nights, then spending the last night back in the hotel.

The Sheridan sounded great from the Internet description. It was pretty expensive as well. It's a good thing Honeywell was footing the bill for that one! And it was smack in the middle of the downtown area, so there was lots of neat things to do within walking distance. However, when we arrived we found out that 1. You have to PAY for Internet service! GASP! and 2. Local calls cost something like 75 cents a minute. They even CHARGED for 1-800 numbers! and 3. There was no complimentary continental breakfast or happy hour or anything. Their fabulous indoor pool was so not kid friendly, as it didn't have a 'shallow' end for Archie to play in. He can actually swim, but it's nice to be able to rest your feet on the bottom of the pool every now and again to catch your breath! They weren't keen on kids in the hot tub part either, but we decided that he could swim there since it was the only water Archie would be able to swim in, with the exception of the bathtub, perhaps.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. While we are packing on Sunday afternoon and loading the car, the wind really picked up. I mean REALLY picked up. Just before we drove out of the driveway, I started seeing debris on the street and in the yard. Nothing major...just some small twigs with leaves still attached...but they were littering the street and yard. We figured we were getting Hurricane Ike remnants, like it was predicted. We even joked about this wind being worse than some of the smaller hurricanes we've been through in Mobile! Ohio doesn't get hurricanes. Also, there was a wind advisory, but the news didn't forecast anything that needed to be worried about. No biggie...so we're off. As we were driving, it was getting worse and worse. The wind was just whipping out there! Corn stalks were blowing across the interstate, we started seeing signs blown over, trees leaning, etc.

So after about two hours, we got a call from Morgan, who is still at home. She told us that the big tree in our front yard snapped in half and is laying in the yard. Actually, it's the city's tree since it once resided on the city's side of the sidewalk. But it's laying in our yard and our neighbour's yard. The power was out as well. So we were thinking that this was one heck of a windstorm.

As it turns out, Morgan experienced the "Blackout of 2008". This was aptly named by the news people. I'm thinking they should've told everyone to hunker down. We wouldn't receive power again til sometime Thursday. Some people were without power for about 10 days.

Aside from having to throw out everything in the freezer and refrigerator (which thankfully, wasn't much to begin with) we had the following hurricane damage:

So I guess you could say we really picked a great time to be out of town! Phillip began to clean up the tree because he wanted the firewood. The city or county or whatever cleaned up some more. Now we have a big giant, tall stump, as they only cleaned up the part that had fallen over. Our other next-door neighbours Bill and Dorothy came over to help Phillip chop the limbs, which was super nice of them since the tree wasn't on their property at all.

So I guess we brought the hurricanes with us when we moved to Cincinnati. Weird.

I'll post about our time in Iowa City hopefully tomorrow. We had a nice time, aside from the crappy fancy hotel we stayed in that I described above. Oh yeah. There's a lot of corn in Iowa. A whole lot of corn.