Hurricane Matthew. By Wednesday they’d cancelled after school activities and evening classes at the University were cancelled. Cali tried to catch the bus home, but there was so much chaos and many buses didn’t show up. I told her to start walking home since the street leading to the school was gridlocked. Kier ended up picking her up a few blocks away at Publix.
Meanwhile we had gathered a few supplies. Autumn-themed candles don’t seem to be popular here, so we scooped up those on the clearance rack–Autumn Harvest, Apple Cider, Pumpkin Gingerbread, and Moss(?). One flashlight, a few more cans, paper plates, extra tp, and we were done. The girls got hurricane treats from the store, things we normally try not to have in the house.
Then we watched and waited to see what kind of mood shifts Matthew was having. He was now clocking in as a category 4 perhaps reaching a 5. That’s serious. We decided that we would leave early in the morning and head West to our friend’s house in Siesta Key, just off of Sarasota. It was a generous offer for her to house 6 people, an abundance of electronics and a doggie. Lucky for us she has an empty nest with 4 extra bedrooms.
Our escape artist doggie does not care for hurricane prep. He takes advantage of a little chaos and tries to scoot out open doors. So he and the sofa he was tied to became best friends while doors were opened and closed.
The doggie enjoys his naps when we road trip. 
If you want to nap, too, you’ll just have to work around his napping space requirements.
We’re no strangers to hurricanes and other natural disasters. In Guatemala, earthquakes, flooding from tropical storms happened frequently. I always had a backpack of valuables and passports ready to grab, and the girls knew the drill of throwing what they valued into a bag and scooting out the door at a moments notice. We hadn’t done that here, but it was still fast. When you are only able to take one bag, you figure out quickly what you value the most. For us, it was cameras, laptops, hard drives, and Derek took his Xbox. We knew get things off the floor so that if the house floods, things have a chance of surviving. We grabbed the dog, said good-luck to our house, and scooted off into the pitch black early morning.
Our hostess was beyond generous and lives in a tropical oasis. In addition to a large pool and outdoor living area, it was at least four distinct living areas including a chimnea seating area, a campfire area, arboretum of orchids, hammock between two huge palm trees, pool, kayaks and canoes for the canal. A beautiful property with many large trees, bunches of mature bamboo, taller than the house. 
We stormed her castle and she had filled the fridge, put chocolate bars on our beds, welcomed us with specialty chocolate cake. She’d tucked her cats away to make our dog feel free to wander. He only did a little jail break once and toured the neighborhood. They managed to get him into the car, because he didn’t want to be left behind and jumped in.
Here’s the storm that blew in while we were kayaking. We hid in the mangroves and then made a break for it between the thunder and lightning. We were the four parents. Had the kids been caught out there in that storm we would have had a fit.
We went on the beaches, shopped, coffeed, had thai food for supper. Madi and Derek went fishing and she caught her first big catfish while standing in the backyard, Cali had a long nap. We had Thai food that evening.
We went to the gorgeously white Siesta Key Beach, rated top beach in the country, many years running.
Walked along the docks of the sailing club.
A few of us went shopping. One of my favorite stores was this spice shop.
The Ringling (from circus fame) Museum is also in Sarasota.
We all slept stress-free comfort while Matthew was doing his thing on the other coast. The next day we went back to Miami, our 24 hour evacu-vacay over. That’s really the way to do a hurricane.