This is my evacuation story, complete with pictures:
Sunday the fires broke out in Ramona, due to an electrical transformer exploding or something. The fire jumped, due to the Santa Ana winds, that moved east to west. We watched the news as the fires progressed. Later that evening we heard that the fire had jumped to our old neighborhood in Rancho Bernardo, but we didn’t think it would come to our street or the neighborhoods around it. But it did. We went to sleep, safe and sound. By Monday the fire jumped to where the hubby’s sister lived. Mum called them early, like around 4 a.m. to get them evacuated and to come here. They did as quickly as they could, which ended up taking 2 hours because the freeways were closed so they had to go the very long way. Then the fire jumped to where my hubby’s friend Sparkles lived. We called him, but he didn’t think it would come that far into his place. He did pack up though, and come to our house. Suddenly our little house became the news hub and everyone crashed there. By the afternoon, Sparkles realized how serious the fire was so he went to get his cat. By this time I was working, making a whopping 11 grand my the end of the day. Our busiest day of the year. When I came home, everyone was safe and happy, but glued to the tv, watching our old house burn to the ground. I kept calling my mom to try to get her to come, because the fire was coming more towards their way. By the end of the night, the fires had jumped north east of us, but we thought we were ok. So we all slept as peacefully as we could, knowing the fires were around us and burning up our house in RB. Silly us, Santa Ana’s moved east to west and we were west of the fire.
Tuesday morning, mum came barging into our house, telling us we needed to leave NOW. Luckily for us, Sparkles was still packed, and we had packed a little bit the night before, just in case. I loaded up the animals, my Isis in the back seat of my little Honda Civic, Oso in the passenger seat, and the luggage and laptop, in the trunk. Hubby had all the photo albums, yearbook, important papers and dog supply stuff in his trunk, my bird and gecko in the passenger seat. We ended up with 7 cars: a minivan, a Ford escort, a Chrysler sebring, a Toyota camry, a PT cruiser, a Chevy camaro and my Honda. We had a total of 13 people, 3 crested geckos, 1 cat, 1 bird, and 7 dogs. We headed out, following hubby’s cousin with a plan of going north to Temecula. We started out ok, but ended up going at a crawl because everyone else had to evacuate and there was only one route out, the other two were closed due to the fire. When we did drive out, we had to drive out through the fires in Fallbrook, the fire had destroyed everything on both sides of the freeway. We got to McDonalds, had breakfast. At this point my mom knew where I was, she called me and said there was a Motel 6 that would take us and our pets. We called to see if they had room, they were very rude and short. So we had the cousin’s mom book reservations online. We went to the Motel, but they said the rooms weren’t ready and wouldn’t be ready for at least 3 hours. So we stopped and waited for a bit before moving over to cousin’s friends house until the rooms were ready.
Then we noticed the omnious looking clouds smoke, and thought, well I hope we don’t need to go again.
So we ended up staying the night there. We ate Dominos at the hotel room, got munchies and stuff we forgot from the store, and glued ourselves to CNN. It was interesting, to say the least. My Isis wanted to play with the kitty and Oso, which they wanted no part of. We had to walk them often, to get rid of excess energy/anxiety. My poor gecko was not happy at all, he was a very dark color cramped up in his travel cage. The room was definitely not big enough for all of us.
Wednesday the smoke from the fires had come to see us.
There was talk of us needing to evacuate again, so I called, to which the store I was going to help at was understanding. But my own store was not. There wasn’t much to do except try keep us updated, which is hard to do when all the news channels covered the LA fires. It was very tiresome/stressful to stay at that hotel. Luckily, Sparkles and hubby’s sister got to go home by Thursday, which meant we got to stay at someone else’s house. So we got to pack up and leave.
I had to go back to work, which I wasn’t happy about. But luckily we got to home later that afternoon, where I got to come home to a wonderful, but ashy home the hubby cleaned for me.
