Five Years Since Charley

For those who don't know - Derek and I lived in Winter Park, Florida while Derek attended Full Sail to get his degree in Film and Video Production. We had a lot of fun experiences in the 14 months we lived in Florida. Derek enjoyed school, we made lasting friendships, made the one hour drive to the beach often and learned to surf! Derek took the surfing to the extreme and even grew his hair out... he also lost his wedding ring to the ocean a few days before our first anniversary. (Good thing I bought the insurance on it!)

Then there was this~ Hurricane Charley... Yep, that's the state of Florida under that giant hurricane!

At first it was exciting, we'd never experienced a hurricane before. I don't know if Mom remembers but I was one the phone with her when I looked out the window of our third floor apartment to see this wall cloud:

We decided to stay in our apartment thinking it wouldn't be too bad. And we were fine... but I think we both had our doubts during the worst of it when we huddled on the floor in the kitchen away from windows. We learned later that a hurricane passing over in about 45 minutes as this one did is rare. Usually they take a day or two. So for us Kansas Kids Charley was more like a long lasting tornado.

I don't have many pictures since we hadn't gone digital yet. And most of what I found are black and white. We didn't think to run out and buy film before the storm and had B&W white film in the camera.

Charley did a lot of damage to our area.

That's me taking picture of trees laying on their sides and on top of cars:

This tree is on top of three cars and pulled the curb up with it:

This is a huge billboard bent right in half:

I spent more time than I should have today looking for these pictures. Sorry they're not great... and that I couldn't find more. Just wanted to do a little recap of our day five years ago... the next week was the worst part, we were without power for six days. Central Florida was pretty much chaos for a while. Things go haywire when you can't even pump gas! It was an experience we'll never forget. Especially since the six weeks after Charley also brought hurricanes, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne our way! What a summer!