Once the sun came up today it gave us a better picture of what type of damage Hurricane Charlie had done to the area. In our yard, there was just a couple of downed tree limbs, nothing much. We had a pretty pathetic pile of branches compared to some of our neighbors. Up the street, a giant oak tree had come crashing down, laying across a neighbor’s yard. As it got closer to lunch time, the girls were bouncing off of the walls so we decided to go to Chic-fil-a so that they could play. On our way we drove through our neighborhood to see if there was any more damage. In a couple of areas, trees had falling into the screened in porches that everyone has around their pools. We saw a couple of more downed trees, but it looks like most everyone was fortunate that none of the big trees hit their house. The lake near our house had a ton of dead wood trees in it, the hurricane ripped those apart and the lake is now filled stumps.

We found out that our friends that live in another part of our neighborhood had been without power since the hurricane hit last night. Talking to other people we found out that a majority of our county was without power and we consider ourselves lucky that we were only without power for 15 minutes. For some reason around 10:00 this morning, our phone line and Internet connection went dead. It’s been down all day and just got restored.

Hurricane Charles was one to remember. Today’s picture is another one of Charlie as it approached us. We are just glad it grew so much weaker before it hit us. May we be so lucky next time.

At about 2:00 this afternoon we got word that Hurricane Charlie was taking a turn to bring it south of Tampa and towards Orlando. Then at 3:00 it was upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 miles per hour and hit Fort Myers, Florida.

As predicted, it tracked right over the top of Orlando and then right over our house. We were hit by three waves of storms. The first was at 3:00 and is seen in the picture moving into the neighborhood. We had another wave at 6:30 and finally the storm right in front of the eye of the storm reached us at 9:00. By the time it reached us, Charlie had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane and the television reported gusts of winds at 70 miles per hour in our area. The wind picked up with each wave with the final wave knocking out the power. Fortunately, we were only without power for 15 minutes. We had just put Abby to bed and when the power went out, she started yelling from her room. We tried to explain that the power went out, but she kept asking “how”. She stayed up with us until the storm had passed and then we convinced her to go back to bed.

Now the eye has passed over us and the back side of the hurricane is pretty weak. We just got finished surveying the yard and it doesn’t look like we sustained any damage. It appears we have survived our first Florida hurricane.