Move Sally Move! ~ Where are the Jays

As in the hurricane. A friend posted on Facebook that she kept thinking of the lyrics ride Sally ride. I wanted to scream Move Sally Move!!!

If you remember the ending of our last post we headed down to the beach after Labor Day with dreams of beach walks and floating in the warm ocean. Yeah well thanks to Sally we got to do that for a couple of days and then she crashed the party big time. First she teased us - the weather men said we are on the outer edge of the cone today but we will know more in a day or 2 when the cone width shrinks. Okay we stocked up on water and batteries and started trying to figure out what to do with my convertible but no biggie. The update came out with us no longer in the cone - phew - back to the beach for a walk. Next thing we know darn Sally had moved east a little and we were back at the edge of the cone but she was also dropping down to a tropical storm. Okay unpack my sewing machine and things to do for a couple of really rainy days.

Then we had a cleaning crew in working on our upholstery and the lead asks if we are staying there thru the storm to which I replied yes. He said he wouldn't. Huh??? He said yeah she is coming for Mobile Bay now and the way she is just sitting there I think she'll grow to a 3. Gulp. (We are located very close to the opening of the bay and in fact you can see the bay from our front door.) Knowing me he saw a panicked look on my face and then said yeah on second thought it probably won't grow. This by the way is Monday afternoon at about 3 o'clock or so. Locally there is a 4 o'clock news so we start preparing to leave and say we will decide based on the news. Lets just say we were out of there by 5 pm. Yeah not a lot of forethought was put into what we took with us. We grabbed clothes for 4 days in hindsight more would have been good, our computers, some of the charging blocks for phones we had charged, reading material, a quilt I am working on and a little food from the freezer since we knew we had a microwave and refrigerator in the room. Trust me when I say there were still a fair number of people at the Beach Club and a lot heading out to the end of the peninsula as we were leaving. At that moment, I felt a little wimpish, but I also kept reminding myself of what a former co-worker who now has a place on an island by St Pete told me was their hurricane plan - we leave when they say the word hurricane. People asked how the rain was - light for most of the drive, but the wind was strong as we crossed over bodies of water. Due to Sally's expected turn after landfall, we headed towards Tallahassee. But, Tallahassee itself has bad covid rates so we stopped a half hour out of it in the small town of Quincy, FL where the rates were much better - hey I don't want to die by hurricane or covid!

So Sally did visit the Beach Club. I think she is one visitor we wish had never come or at least made it a quicker visit. A lot of owners have complained how rough and unruly the clientele was this past summer; well I am sure she was our worst visitor EVER. She took part of the roof off of one building, ruined its penthouse, took a part of a side wall off another, part of an exterior staircase, blew in glass sliding doors, broke trees, threw things everywhere and scared guests to death (yes guests stayed through a hurricane). From the maps of landfall I have seen, I believe either the eye went over the Beach Club or just missed it a little to our east.

Avalon and Bristol suffered the worst damage

The Penthouse lost its roof, with the subsequent water causing significant damage as the water worked its way down through the building.

Bristol's Penthouse 1 lost its roof, which caused significant water damage on multiple floors.

The moment of truth for Jeff and me was when we opened the front door of our unit 3 days after the storm. If it was dark in there that would be good because I had closed the curtains before we left - crazy mind thought that would help somehow. The front door was there and when we opened up it was dark. We hugged each other in relief. So how did our condo do? Well pretty good considering everything. Like a lot of units our front bedroom or north one suffered some water damage. Seems the one traditional window we had in the unit leaked so the wall got wet as did the carpet along that wall. We also had some water spots on the ceiling close to our utility closet which makes sense since there is a drainage system from the roof that runs through all the utility closets. 30 inches of rain overwhelmed it - no big surprise there.

Personal Protective Equipment is required

We spent 2 nights in our condo. The first night was without power at all and the second night was on a huge generator that was doing all 128 condos in our building- very impressive. By this time, there were workers everywhere - literally a couple hundred. We agreed we needed to leave and get out of their way. So we left for a week to go to Asheville where we had wanted to go earlier this year and chose not to at the time. We stopped in Atlanta on the way there and back. Partially to visit Jeff's relatives and partially to leave my car there for the week. When we got back to our unit 8 days later, we found huge blowers and dehumidifiers in our unit, the carpeting gone in the front bedroom, even more workers on the resort, and security concerns starting because robbery was becoming a problem in Fort Morgan in general. After 2 days, we decided to leave for a few days for our safety and sanity. We headed to the Fort Meyers area of Florida. And wondering if when we come back to our unit next time if there would be wall board removed from part of our front bedroom.