Hurricane Ivan

Posted by Stuart at 05:36 PM on September 16, 2004

Another undercurrent of my past week has been preparing for my trip back to America in October. Now that Piyawat has his visa (a 10-year visa, amazingly enough) we are ready to go. I will be cashing in some United Miles for this trip, which will definitely help out because the rest of the trip will be very expensive.

The plan, as I mentioned before, is to drive from San Francisco to North Carolina in a big U-Haul truck. It's going to be a long, but fun 2 weeks, I hope.

One of the stops we are planning on making is in Florida to visit my sister. Right now as I type this, she (and the rest of that part of the country) is getting hit very hard by Hurricane Ivan. I talked to her a bit last night and she is in good spirits.

(Click here for a big picture of the current radar.)

In any case, it will be interesting to go to Pensacola and to visit the beach. Who knows what will be left of it, because at this very moment, it is under about 15 feet of swirling, churning sea water. When I lived through Hurricane Fredrick in 1979, I remember going out to the completely flat beach that had huge sand dunes to play on just the day before. It was a shocking sight.

WOW! Just as I am typing this, I got an email from my sister. She is taking refuge at her boyfriend's office, which is in an old department store. It should be very safe there. This is what she said:

The worst of it, before the eye of the storm, is hitting us right now. Roofs are starting to leak, however structuring on a whole, things are okay. Elevator is broken, security systems is down (which means that no telling how long we will be here). Cell phones still seem to be working, at least for the time being.

Once this has passed ... looking to get back to tropical storm force winds, probably by late tomorrow afternoon .... it's going to be, I'm afraid, devastating for many, many people from Mobile to Pensacola, then pretty gosh darn terrible to the west and east of us. We won't know until tomorrow, possibly Friday.

My thoughts and prayers go out to her and all the others who are laying low and waiting for Mother Nature to take her course.

Bad News: U.S. Trip Cancelled

Posted by Stuart at 09:35 AM on September 23, 2004

Here is the email that I just sent to my friends and family who I had told that I was visiting the US in October:

I have some bad news. Looks like Piyawat and I will have to cancel our trip to the US. I made the mistake of not looking into the rental truck before making other plans. What I found out was that U-Haul has a very strict policy about the number of days you can rent and the number of miles you can drive. So, our plan of a leisurely tour of America has been squashed. Since renting a truck one-way is not a cheap option, we don't think that it is worth our time and money at this point.

I still want to move my stuff to North Carolina, so I think what I will do is to ship it in December when I come back to the US for Christmas. I found one company that will do this called ABF U-Pack. Basically you pack up a big crate and they ship it for you. Have you ever heard of this company or any like it? Sounds like a legitimate way to do it.

Needless to say, I am disappointed. Oh well. Guess I'll see most of you in December...

What a bummer. On the one hand, we will save a lot of money by not going. On the other, a cross-country drive sounded like a lot of fun...