Power is gradually being restored to the area, though many of our friends are still without. If we stay near home, it is easy to conclude that things are nearly back to normal. Janet and I went shopping yesterday, and business was “as usual” for the most part. The greatest lack seems to be gasoline, as supplies have been disrupted, and it is needed not only for cars but for generators. Porter drove to a church meeting about 40 minutes away and found no gas available anywhere between here and there. I’m grateful I was able to fill the gas tank on the “other” car before the storm hit. I had been tempted not to bother, since we had one car that could get us where we needed to go, and the other was about half full. I did not reckon on gas being so hard to find after the storm, and we needed it tonight when we picked Andy up from the airport.
That was certainly an adventure. It was the first time we had been down through Orlando since the storm. We had heard that all major roads were open, but on that trip Janet and I learned that “open” does not mean “operating normally.” I-4 was fine, but we ran into our first snag when we exited onto Michigan Avenue. Suddenly all was dark, except for blinding flares and flashing police lights. It might have been possible to turn left, but as far as we could see we were being forced to turn right. So we did, turning around when we could, in a darkened parking lot. Darkened! That was the appropriate adjective for most of the trip. I suspect we would have found Charley’s destruction even more impressive had we been able to see it. We had glimpses of downed poles entangled in wires, uprooted trees, shattered signs, obliterated billboards, and metal structures doing homage to the storm in sweeping, low bows. But we didn’t see much; it was all we could do to see where we were going, and we didn’t always do a good job at that. We might as well have been on another planet for all the cityscape looked familiar. In the dark, landmarks—aren’t. Especially when your dark-adjusted eyes come into an intersection and are blinded by the flashing lights of police cars.
Finally we were able to read a street sign, and confirmed our suspicions that we had missed our turn. We reversed direction (again, in the dark), only to find that we could not turn left where we needed to but were forced by the police barricades to go straight. So we did, and turned around again, and were able to get on the right road.
Not that our troubles were over. On this road, some of the lights were working, but in fact that was not much help, because others were not. And this time there was no control at all at those intersections. When the lights are out, you are supposed to treat the intersection as a four-way stop, but we discovered that that is easier said than done, since it’s difficult to see a light that’s not on until it is too late to stop, especially if there’s a car behind you that whose driver is most likely not expecting you to stop! We discovered, too, how our eyes naturally focus on the next (working) light; it took constant, active thought to remember to look for the invisible lights.
Alerted by now to the fact that we could not depend on landmarks to tell our subconscious minds that the turn was coming up, we anticipated our next turn and moved smoothly into the left lane—only to find it blocked by police barricades. At this intersection, we could go neither left nor straight, but were forced to turn right. Again we traveled until we found a safe place to turn around and resume our journey.
There were a few more difficulties before we arrived at the airport, but only one more surprise: a tree that suddenly loomed out of the darkness completely across our path. Fortunately, it did not block all lanes, and we were able to go around it.
The airport itself was no problem, and our misadventures, it turned out, had been perfectly timed: we arrived just as Andy’s luggage was coming off carousel. We took a different way home and had much less trouble. The landscape was still foreign, but most of the lights were working, and we had no turns until we were nearly home. We checked out the gas stations and found a few that we think were selling gas, though most were clearly empty.
