I want to start out this post by saying that I got incredibly lucky with Hurricane Milton. The storm’s path started turning south while it was in the Gulf of Mexico, although it nudged a bit more north as it made landfall in Siesta Key, which is about 40 miles south of me. My apartment avoided the worst of the storm as well as the storm surge that was estimated to be worse than Helene. I kept my pet camera running so I could keep an eye on things and find out if I lost power. While I lost power initially (sometime after 11 p.m.), it came back in the morning. It was such a relief to have power! Being without it for nearly a week with Helene was awful and I was desperate not to go through that again.

My mom’s house is also fine. A part of her fence fell down but Robert was able to fix it. They don’t have power, but they aren’t dealing with any flooding or roof issues, which were our main concerns. It is such a relief.

I spent so much of last weekend in a panic and thinking through the scenarios of what we would do if my apartment and my mom’s house were both unlivable. What do we do? I googled my rights as a renter (I believe I would be able to get out of my lease and rent another apartment, but that’s not a given). I thought about friends we could stay with and worried through all the logistics of staying with someone else while having so many animals to care for, too. I tried making light of the situation at times, like when my mom showed me a cute Halloween decoration while we were shopping for groceries in Ocala, “Well, I’m not going to have a home to go back to, so better not buy it.” It is a deeply unsettling feeling to not know if you’ll have a home to return to after an evacuation. And since two of my friends in book club are dealing with that very scenario (their homes took on multiple feet of water during Helene and they lost everything), it doesn’t feel dramatic. It’s a very real thing that people in my community are dealing with.

Once I learned that Hurricane Milton was heading right to my city, I knew I had to evacuate. I live in a Zone A flood zone and while I live on the third floor and don’t have to worry about flooding inside my apartment, I do have to worry about something happened to the roof of my building or a tree smashing into one of my windows and shattering it. Also, I saw what a storm surge does to my complex’s parking lot and Milton’s was estimated to be worse. I didn’t want to be around for what could happen.

Not to mention – have you ever ridden out a Category 3 hurricane? It’s terrifying. The wind is insane, the rain is nonstop, trees are falling down, and debris is pelting roofs and homes. And since most of these hurricanes make landfall when it’s dark outside, it’s even scarier because you can’t see what is happening.

When my city announced mandatory evacuations for Zones A-C, I already had the VRBO booked and my bags packed. I wasn’t waiting around for this storm.

My mom and I left for Ocala on Monday around noon and thankfully, the drive wasn’t too bad. I know it got worse and worse as the day went on (and Tuesday was a shitshow), so I’m glad we left when we did. That meant we were settled in our VRBO by 4 p.m. on Monday and ready to ride out the storm in a much safer place. And while evacuating is never a fun experience, there is something sweet and comforting about having this time with my mom. I still have fond memories of our time in Ft. Lauderdale two years ago when we were evacuating from Hurricane Ian. It was nice to be able to work side-by-side with my mom, hang out with the dogs, and binge Love is Blind episodes in the evenings.

The cats did pretty well! We kept them closed up in the primary bedroom since it had an en-suite bathroom and a bit more space for them to run around. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that the door did not actually close even when locked, as Chip could easily push his way inside to terrorize the cats. (And by terrorize, I simply mean that he wanted to love on them but the girls were not having it.) So we created a barricade that they could not traverse, which was real fun to step around every time I needed to go into the room.

They ate well, used the litter box, and even came onto the bed at night for lots of pets and snuggles, so they handled the evacuation just fine. We will not talk about the methods I had to use to get them back into their carriers on Friday morning. Let’s just say I had to take a breather after that madness because my heart rate was so high. Whew.

The VRBO we stayed at was excellent, too! It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms (one with a walk-in shower and one with a bathtub), a large living room, a den, and a well-stocked kitchen. It even had a fenced-in backyard! I started envisioning plans for a reading weekend here with some girlfriends. It had plenty of places to lay around and read! (The downside is that they don’t have any sort of outdoor furniture, womp.) Anyway, it was a great find, especially considering we had four pets and they only charged me a $55 pet fee (most places charge $50 per day per pet!) Maybe this will be our new go-to evacuation house.

But let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Hurricane Milton. It was an anxiety-ridden week for me. I was so terrified of this storm. I’m a lifelong Floridian but I do have a healthy fear of hurricanes because while the Tampa Bay area hasn’t been directly hit in over a century, there’s only so long that we can be so lucky. And in the end, some of us were lucky but many of us were not. Which is the way it goes with these storms unfortunately. The impact of dealing with Helene only to turn around and get hit with Milton is a sucker punch of the worst sort. We’re still reeling, slowly putting our lives back together, and now we have this new storm to contend with.

I went back and forth on how much I wanted to follow news coverage of Milton. I have a favorite meteorologist I follow who doesn’t fall into the trap of sensationalizing these storms. He provides factual, helpful information multiple times a day, and his tone is so very needed during an anxious time. He doesn’t sugarcoat what’s happening but his calmness provides me a level of relief. He’s very much a “prepare for the worst, hope for the best” kind of person, so he makes sure we know what we need to do to prepare while making sure there is some levity and hope in his updates. Anyway, from him, I know that the National Hurricane Center provides updated tracks of the hurricane four times a day (5 a.m., 11 a.m., 5 p.m., and 11 p.m.) so those were the only times I looked up his updates. Sometimes the news was good and sometimes the news was bad. All I knew was that I did what I could to prepare and the rest was up to Mother Nature.

The storm was forecast to make landfall around 9 p.m. on Wednesday. In Ocala, we had heavy rainfall all day Wednesday, and it started to get really windy in the evening. Our Internet at the VRBO went out around 9:30 but we still had power, so we were grateful for that! I kept checking on my pet camera at home and was grateful that it was still accessible, which meant I still had power. (The power went out at my mom’s house earlier that evening.) When I went to bed on Wednesday night, the wind was squalling bad outside but I felt grateful to be in a safe home with my girls.

The power at our VRBO eventually went out sometime in the middle of the night. All I remember is that I woke up and the ceiling fan was silent so womp, womp. I checked on my pet camera at home and it was offline, so that was a disappointing discovery but not unexpected. We didn’t know how long the power would be out at our home in Ocala so we decided around 10 a.m. to eat the last of the ice cream bars in our freezer and just as we were doing that, the power came back! And the Internet, too! What a relief. I checked on my pet camera in the afternoon and was shocked to see that it was up and running again, which meant my power and my Internet were back.

My mom and I drove back home to St. Petersburg on Friday morning. Finding a place for gas was pretty fun! We wanted to gas up in Ocala because we had heard that Tampa/St. Pete were completely out of gas. The first gas station didn’t have any gas but the second gas station did, although there was a long wait to get gas. The other fun part of the drive home was stopping for lunch. We found a McDonald’s that had a long line wrapped around the building (they only had the drive-thru open with a limited menu) and getting in and out of there was a bit of a nightmare, but what can you do?! The good news is, the drive home wasn’t too bad! There were a few slow-downs here and there, but nothing too frustrating to deal with. We got back into town around 2:30 p.m. and it felt so, so good to be home.

I was the lucky one this time, but so many people were not. Most households in my city are still without power today, tons of businesses are still not able to operate, and our beloved Tropicana Field where the Rays play no longer has a roof. Things are hard and they will remain hard for a long time. But I consider myself incredibly lucky to have a home where this time I can be a refuge for those without power. Paying it forward, Florida style.