After driving home for the hurricane to help get the house ready, we realized that since we had not had a hurricane in so long the wood that was for the windows had been used. There were reports that the local Lowes was going to get a shipment of wood in. My neighbor and i went up and waited in line for three hours when news came that the truck with the wood was diverted to another location. We were pretty bummed out after that, but on the way home we saw a truck loaded with wood, after hanging a U-turn we were after the truck and back in line waiting it was another few hours and we were home with all out wood. A side note, as we were waiting in lone we overheard a woman in line say with a straight face "It's a category five now, and is predicted to become a category 6." we both had to try very hard to hold the laughter in after that. The process of boarding up the house was pretty straight forward. As the windows get covered the house slowly gets darker and darker, until the last is covered and at high noon you can walk around the house and it looks like a cave.

A view of the neighbors house, the one who stood in line with me for all those hours. Many of the other neighbors also boarded up.

After the evacuation the driveways were bare most people in our neighborhood evacuated.

Another empty street.

The usually busy streets were deserted save for the occasional police car. Street crime would not have been a problem, on average it looked like the police out numbered the citizens 5 to 1.

On any normal day this picture would have been close to impossible due to all the traffic.

The night before the storm the clouds grew, building in height, and increasing in speed.

As the night progressed the clouds grew darker, quicker, and more menacing, foreshadowing what was to come.

After dodging a huge bullet, we woke up to see what happened, except for the smaller or weak tree branches there was very minimal damage that could have been caused by a strong thunder storm.

Just lots of sticks and twigs to clean up.

This was the most damage we saw and if you look closely at the sheer point you can see that rust had eaten away at the bottom of the pole weakening it.

A cat, like the humans, that took cover during the storm, peeks its head out to survey his world, no doubt wondering what he just lived through, and thanking god it was over.