Thursday

We spent the afternoon cleaning up the yard. We started by cleaning up the street; then we worked on Anita's yard across the street. We filled up our two yard bins and made a pile of larger limbs at her curb. She has large oak trees that hang over into her yard, scattering lots of debris. I couldn't start on our yard until I got hers looking better. She still has a lot of little twigs and limbs left. Ann, her daughter, came out and raked some. Meanwhile, I raked our yard on all four sides.

I hauled the chairs out of the garage and scrubbed them down before setting them back in place. I set the sandbags aside until we learn what to do with them. I cleaned the welcome mat. John washed Toby's towels that had accumulated from drying Toby off after every walk. I vacuumed up all the debris we tracked in yesterday. 

This shot of Lake Saundra park gives you an idea how our yard looked before we cleaned it up. We had leaves, small oak branches from across the street, and magnolia cones.

The sun finally came out this afternoon. The temperature was in the low to mid 70s. We opened our windows and enjoyed the fresh air. Everyone we met today felt relieved and grateful that it wasn't a direct hit. We never lost power. We all feel bad for the folks south of us. I read that the Sanibel causeway collapsed in three places, and there is no other way on or off the island or the adjoining Captiva Island. The same is true for the nearby bridge from Matlacha Island to Pine Island, connecting to Cape Coral. 

Everyone we know who evacuated ended up in a worse place than if they had stayed in place, but when they made their plans, they were following evacuation orders for low-lying properties, and at the time, it looked like we were going to get hit. It's really difficult to know what to do when there are millions of people on a thin peninsula with only two interstates to take people out. Our take away is that we would leave for a category 4 of 5 if the prediction looked solid. A 3 would be scary, but evacuating has its risks, too. 

We drove the car to Dollar General this morning after our Toby walk in the neighborhood and walked the causeway from there. Frenchy's Market was all boarded up.

The water was sandy and turbulent. 

A sailboat broke loose and crashed into the causeway bridge.

The breeze was blowing at least 20 mph on our walk. Even though the temperature was in the 70s, the wind made it feel cold.

We bundled up.

Lots of white caps and clouds.

We turned around at the bathrooms when we saw this sign. 

There were not many people walking this morning. 

The wind was coming from the northwest, which meant it was a struggle to walk on the way out. We felt like mountain climbers. It was exhausting. On the way back, we had to use our feet to brake us because the wind was pushing us faster than our feet could keep up. I think we should get extra credit for that walk!

We had prepared chicken to eat if we lost power, so we had that for dinner, on toast, with carrot sriracha hummus, and one of our last avocados. Delicious.

Toby started breaking out in bumps again, so we immediately administered Benadryl. That seemed to calm the allergic reaction because they are almost all gone. We're perplexed about what he might be allergic to. There was no grass-rolling for him yesterday, that's for sure. Maybe it was from the day before? On Benadryl today, he was a little angel. Yesterday, he was an enfant terrible.

Miles walked: 10.9

Miles biked: 0