Frances is Coming!

I've lived in Florida for 30 years. And in those 30 years we've had our fair share of hurricane scares. We've even been grazed by a hurricane or two in my area. Now it looks like we're going to get hit with the second one in less than three weeks.

The good news is that hurricane Frances' path has shifted a bit. Last night it looked like Daytona Beach was going to be dead center of Frances' trip through the Sunshine State. Now we'll probably just get a glancing blow. And this blow will be stronger than Charley who came through a couple of weeks ago.

With Charley we lost power for three days. And we were lucky. Some people lost their lives, others lost their homes and personal possessions. Beatty's house had two huge tree limbs come through the roof ... and he considers himself lucky since no one was hurt.

You're probably wondering why we don't just leave when there's a hurricane coming. The fact is that many people do. The highways have been backed up all day. The traffic crawls and tempers rise. When we attempted to leave five years ago, we got caught up in the traffic crawl and saw more accidents and people arguing and bad behavior... the roads ended up being more dangerous than the weather.

The other fact is that most hurricanes are so big and change their paths often enough that you really don't know where they're going to end up. For Charley some people headed to the Daytona Beach area and wound up right in the path after Charley shifted. Frances is as big as the state of Texas...

The bad weather is supposed to start tomorrow with the worst of it hitting us on Saturday [and going into Sunday]. We're probably going to lose power for a while [and nothing else I hope]. At any rate, I'll post an update as soon as I can after that.

And if Frances shifts even father away from Daytona that loud noise you hear will be my sigh of relief. ; )