It sure is amazing to see the footage of the devastation caused by recent hurricanes especially down on the Gulf Coast, but also up in the Midwest where the hurricane rained down Gulf waters on Chicago’s city streets (and most of it is still there!).
Personally, I’ve never lived in a place that was threatened by hurricanes. I can’t imagine what it would be like. Windy, I suppose.
I have been through tornadoes & floods, though. But that’s not the most interesting natural disaster I’ve lived through. When I was 12, my family took a road trip out to California. Exhausted and terribly sick of our Ford Aerostar minivan, we finally arrived in Anaheim, CA the day before Easter. No sooner were we settled in our sturdy, concrete built hotel room than my parents announced that we were going to spend Easter at Disneyland. Whoo hoo! My sister & I could hardly settle down for bed!
As we were watching California news (which we thought was so much more ‘Californian’ than our news), my dad walked by the tv. The stand wobbled a bit. He turned around to walk back. The stand wobbled again. And then the walls started to come alive: cockroaches crawled out from everywhere-scurrying all around us like there was some kind of cockroach convention scheduled for our hotel room that night. Then came the surfing. As we stood in awe of the prolific magnitude of cockroach reproductive rates, the concrete floor began to wave underneath our feet. For just a few seconds, it felt like we were on the ocean (sans salty smell). As the floor turned from jello back to concrete, my mom figured out what happened, “That was an earthquake”, and was confirmed momentarily by the LA newscasters, “Dude, that was a gnarly earthquake!” (j/k). We were so freaked out by the wavy concrete and the overpopulation of cockroaches that we threw everything back into our car & drove all night back to Vegas, where we had relatives. Later that next day, we learned that the earthquake was rated a 6.1 and our relatives in Vegas had felt it too!
I thought the earthquake was cool. Cockroaches – not so much.
I still haven’t been to Disneyland. **sigh**
What’s your natural disaster story? I know you’ve got one!! Share as a comment!
Tags: california, disneyland, earthquake, natural disaster, vegas
Oh my! Thanks for the memories John. That was a terrible trip! The image of cockroaches EVERYWHERE is burned into my brain. That didn”t gross me out as much as Mom shaking them out of our suitcases when we got back to Vegas.