Friday October 11th 2024

I got up this morning, grabbed some breakfast and started my journey back to Hurricane Country. As I ventured from Georgia to Central Florida the signs of a hurricane gradually came into view.

My first observation was the high water level in the St. Johns river in Jacksonville. This river empties most of the rain from the northeastern part of the state. All of the creeks and rivers from just southeast of Orlando all the way to the central ridge up the peninsular drains into the St. Johns estuary. South of Orlando on the eastern side of the central ridge mostly flows toward the Everglades. All of the rivers on the peninsular have a lot of work to do in the next few days.

The second hurricane related observation on my journey south was the utility trucks. The large convoys of trucks moving south I saw on Tuesday were replaced by a few specialized utility trucks heading south from way up north. Today I played car hopscotch with four utility trucks from Ohio and Michigan. They seemed to be big augur trucks design to dig holes for over sized utility poles. I think they had plenty of ordinary line man style trucks. There were a couple of convoys of those smaller bucket trucks heading north. Maybe they completed their job and headed home.

In the St. Augustine area I started to see excessive standing water from overflowing retention pounds along the sides of the interstate. The water came within a few feet of the road. In this area there was also a few random trees down along the side of the road.

I stopped at a rest area north of Orlando. The ground was covered in leaves, pine needles and small branches. The backup generator for the rest area was also running.

Traffic south of Orlando in the resort area was backed up as usual. The theme parks reopened this morning. My GPS indicated it was caused by an accident and the delay was twenty minutes. I took a few short cuts I was familiar with to avoid the delay. It turned out OK, but could have been a mistake. I encountered my first flooded road of the day. There was about five or six inches of water across the road in a low lying area west of Disney. Traffic was going through it fine.

As I got closer to my base camp destination, traffic started to back up. An occasional traffic light was not working. As all of the TV talking heads have been reminding us, you treat an intersection with a non functioning light as a four way stop. The traffic slowed me down a little, but I soon arrived at my base camp. As I made my way through the resort, nothing stood out as significant damage. When I got to the base camp, I found an Amazon package that I didn’t expect until next week and a piece of vinyl trim that doesn’t seem to be from my residence. There were also a collection of random leaves in a corner that wouldn’t allow the wind to disperse.

The bottom line is the base camp made it through the storm fine. I made several walks around the outside looking for anything a miss and didn’t discover anything. The power was on, but blinking clocks indicate it was off at some point. Tomorrow I’ll drive over to the storage lot and check how my RV home survived the storm.