Em and Stu do America Part 8: Special hurricane edition

This post was supposed to be about Miami Beach, but as Irma bears down on that city we thought we would write this instead.

It was pretty amazing to see all the army convoys and signage getting set up on the road north to Atlanta. A massive operation to evacuate so many people.

We left Miami last weekend for a weeklong house-sit in historic St Augustine on Florida’s northeast coast, caring for two Scottish terriers and a vocal parrot named Dixie. But we barely got to do more than kayak on the canal looking, sadly in vain, for manatees before getting the news that a state of emergency was being declared in Florida. Our hosts told us they would be coming home to batten down the hatches and we were welcome to stay, but their advice would be to get out of Florida as soon as we could. So we celebrated Stu’s birthday on the 5th, Tuesday, with roast BBQ pork from my new Mrs Wilkes cookbook and cheesecake from the Cookbook of Juji, and got up on Wednesday to pack. But where to go? Our next booking was in St Petersburg on the Gulf Coast, home of the Dali museum. We had also booked our rental car until September 15, and the earliest we could return it to Atlanta for a refund was the 8th according to their terms. If we returned it before that we would be paying for a car we couldn’t keep, and we also couldn’t really make the drive to Atlanta in a day anyway.

Clyde and his little protege, Cassie.

Lo and behold, in comes a message from the lovely Lisa of our awesome Savannah AirBnB, offering us a place to stay for as long as they were able to stay themselves, given Irma was now looking towards that coastline too. We gratefully accepted, but Lisa and Tammy wouldn’t even take our money – and this really helped us, given we had been counting on the week of free accommodation in St Augustine to soothe the wounds expensive Miami had inflicted.

This beautiful couple insisted we were friends now, and so as friends, we left Florida then and there, rocked up with booze just in time for their pre-hurricane party at their backyard tiki bar on Wednesday evening.

The pre-hurricane party ended rather late.

Traffic had been heavy coming out of Florida, but Irma was still an abstract to us, and we slowly realised the reality of it as we sat listening to our new group of mates in Savannah discuss their plans. What would they do with their pets? Would they stay or leave? Who had a generator? What would their insurance cover or not cover if their cars, their houses got hit? Should they board up their windows? When? Now?

Meanwhile, Stu and I had no place to stay and no plan beyond that night and perhaps the next. As the night developed into debauchery I sought the help of those around me. Bethany had the strongest suggestion – if we had to leave Atlanta Friday, she said, bus to Nashville for a few nights, bus to Memphis. Then it was a hell of a trip to our next booking in New Orleans, but she flattened my idea of seven nights in Jackson Mississippi and I was happy to take her word on that.

Stu gets out before it hits.

We devoted the rest of the night dancing to old Broadway hits in the backyard. It was 2-3am before we went to bed and we awoke Thursday stupidly hungover to the news that Irma had killed people in the Carribbean and was definitely headed to Savannah. I blearily hit the internet and booked a bus for Friday to Nashville and an AirBnB that would do. Surely we could stay here another night. Tammy and Lisa as yet had no plans in place themselves with Lisa particularly occupied attempting to manage the wholesale shifting of her office, staff and company’s equipment to Atlanta, where word had it there was no accommodation left.

But an hour later we got word that an evacuation order would take effect for Savannah from Saturday morning. They would even be changing the flow of traffic on the interstate highway so all roads would lead west. Just imagine…

You can see here the signs taped on to the bowsers that just say “out of gas”.

Amid news of gas stations running out of gas and supermarkets water, we thought we would be idiots to wait another night and rely on getting to Atlanta on Friday. So we messaged the Atlanta host we had stayed with recently who was no longer doing AirBnB but took pity on us and smuggled us in for cash-money, unbeknownst to the snoopy neighbours. We’ll leave now (4pm) and be there by eight, we told her…

It took three gas stations before we found one with gas so we could fill the tank. The shelves were empty, the traffic insane, with traffics and breakdowns strung along the packed highway. It took us nearly seven hours to complete the trip even with no rest stops – we were just barrelling along this unfamiliar highway in the dark, sometimes at a standstill, sometimes going 112km/h – a white-knuckle trip for sure. We arrived around 11pm, apologising to our host, and fell into our bed.

You can just see the line of cars stretching out behind us in the mirror.

We hope Irma will spare our hosts in Florida and our new friends in Savannah and we pray all Tammy and Lisa’s work on their beautiful home (especially the tiki bar – ha!) will be protected.

Headed to Nashville this arvo, over and out!