Around these parts, Sunday is Charger Day! Here's the little fan in his first Charger outfit with Mom and Dad this past Sunday.
Update: Now it's a good luck outfit because our San Diego Super-Chargers beat the crap out of the sorry old Houston Texans that day. We're not going to wash it until the Chagers win the Super Bowl! In fact, we're not going to wash him. just kidding...
First, we are all safe and back at home. We are lucky. The fire came pretty close to us but never made it into our neighborhood. There is a lot of ash and soot everywhere but none inside of the house and our air quality is relatively good. Again, we are lucky.
Here's the story: We awoke Monday morning to high winds and dark smoke in the sky. Here’s a video I took just as the sun was coming up. It’s looking to the east and south. You can’t really tell much but it does show the contrast of smoke vs. clear sky and if you look close, you can see the swirling of the tall trees. Everything you see in the sky is smoke, there were no clouds. You would be able to see better but the rising sun was blacked out by the smoke. It reminded me of back east when a severe thunderstorm approaches; low and black with the trees swirling. Except this time the wind was lip-chapping dry.
It was obvious that I wasn’t going to go to work but looking at the news and the fire maps, I still thought it was going to pass well to the south of us. Nonetheless, I insisted that we pack up “just in case.” Brooke kind of laughed at me and frankly I thought to myself that I was overreacting. So we packed for the baby and the dogs but we really didn’t pack well for ourselves. As most of you know, Brooke’s mom Sue has been here helping us since before Parker was born and Tuesday was the day she was to fly home. So she was with us in all this.
Everything appeared to be stable, so Brooke went back to sleep. Then things changed. Until that time, we had been kind of on a line of demarcation between smoke cover to the south and clear blue morning sky to the north. When I noticed that the clear sky was becoming less visible I stepped outside for another look. This time, I found it difficult to breathe and hard to hold my eyes open. It was like when camp fire smoke blows in your eyes except I couldn’t get out of the way. And most disturbing of all, snowflake-like ashes were beginning to fall all around me. That decided it for me. I woke Brooke and said, “Let’s go!”
We piled the baby and the dogs in the SUV and Sue drove our other car. We didn't know where we were going just that we were going north. For those of you familiar with the area, we fled north up El Camino Real through Encinitas and into Carlsbad. Then we turned west towards the I-5 along Palomar Airport Road. These photos were taken by Brooke along that route.
We tried to find a hotel in Carlsbad or Oceanside but all were already full. Our plight was complicated by the presence of two slobbering bulldogs. Here’s a shot from Carlsbad looking back south out to sea.
Fortunately, Parker slept through most of this. Here’s the littlest refugee on the run:
Sue helped us call around and the closest hotel we could find was a Residence Inn in Garden Grove. So we "took a trip to Garden Grove with Wu Dog inside the van":
The hotel was literally right across the street from Disney World and there were a lot of families with children staying there. It was kind of surreal to walk through a lobby full of kids in mouse ears after what we had been through. Here’s the littlest refugee in the hotel:
Sue was able to get a flight out of LAX so she left the next morning. After that we drove across LA to stay with our good friends in Torrance. Matt Barden used to work with me before going to medical school at USC. He and his wife Kat were very kind to open up their nice home to us on Tuesday night. Of course they offered to let us stay as long as we needed but the news was saying that our area was no longer evacuated so we headed home on Wednesday. This is shot was taken coming down through San Clemente. That’s not a color effect we’ve added. That’s just the color of the air due to all the smoke.
The drive home was exciting because we drove right through the fire on Camp Pendleton at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Here are a few shots from that.
As I said before, we are very lucky. Others not so far from us were not so lucky. Here’s a map of the fire from the signonsandiego.com web site.
The Witch Fire is the big one in the middle that burned east to west accross north of Ramona and south of Escondido. You can zoom in and see where it got into Rancho Santa Fe. That's only about 2 miles east Olivinhain where we live. Thanks to a lot of firefighters and a little luck, it stayed out of our area.
I guess that’s enough for now. Cell phone service has been spotty so we will try to return all your calls as we can. Thanks to everyone for all your prayers. We’re fine now so save them for all those poor folks around here who weren’t so lucky.
