You’ve Got to be Kidding!

So I was all set to go on my mini-vacation to Columbia, for the South Carolina Writer’s Association StoryFest Conference. Had my bags packed and everything. Sure, we were supposed to get some rain and maybe a little wind from Hurricane Helene, but we’ve had storms before. We’re not on the coast so we don’t worry about things like storm surge and flooding. I figured the power would probably go out and sure enough, we woke up to a dark house.

However, Helene had other plans. She swerved and hit Greenville dead on. Right before the eye came overhead, I heard a god-awful clatter from the back of the house. Yelled at the roomie to see if he was all right because it sounded like he’d fallen somehow. He said he was fine but the back porch was gone.

We were lucky in that we didn’t have any big trees to fall on the house, but when I tried to get out of the subdivision to head for my conference (I paid a lot of money for that thing, darn it! And when I got hold of the conference chairwoman, she said Columbia was fine, they were still having it), there was a gigantic oak down across both lanes of the main highway out.

So I came back and sat in the dark until around 2:00. We could hear chainsaws, so I was hoping they were clearing the highway. One of my local writing buddies said a tree fell on her car and she was desperate to get out of Dodge so would I give her a ride to the conference? I maneuvered past the half-trees the road crew had left scattered along the route and met her at the grocery store. On the way to Columbia we found most of the traffic lights out (thankfully, the really bad intersections seemed to be OK–or the crews were concentrating on getting those back online quickly). There were trees down all along the interstate and we were stopped for about 15-20 minutes once, waiting for the road crew to clear one lane. We even ran over some downed power lines in one spot.

When we got to Columbia, however, it looked promising. The traffic lights were on. The gas station was open and busy. The Cracker Barrel was hopping.

Then we got to the hotel. They were running on emergency generators. The Friday night dinner we’d all paid for was canceled and we were told to find something on our own. Adrienne and I met up with Barbara, another from the Greenville group, and we opted for the Cracker Barrel 3 minutes down the road. The wait wasn’t horrible (we’d left fairly early for the dinner hour) and we had a nice meal and a lovely waitress with a good sense of humor.

After that, the keynote speaker for the evening gave us an interesting speech on AI and Screenwriting in the lobby (no overhead lights in the conference rooms), after which everyone went to their respective dark rooms to try to sleep. It was hot and stuffy but I dozed off.

When we woke up, we learned the conference had been canceled at 6:00am (which was too late to prevent some of the coastal people from leaving for the Midlands, so they had the same problem we had, of driving all that way only to turn around and head home again). We still don’t know for certain that they are going to refund any of our money.

Back home, I maneuvered to Adrienne’s street and got as close to the downed tree as I could because there were power lines wrapped in its branches. I actually dropped her at the neighbor’s house across the street. Then it was back home to the dark, stuffy house and some non-perishable food items. The local grocery store didn’t get power until Sunday afternoon so we were eating totally junk food until then.

My boss tried to open the store Tuesday because the office next door called and told him they had power and internet. Well, we had power, but the internet would not come on, so he closed it up again and sent me home. I did work Thursday because he figured out how to run the internet through his phone. Seemed to me it would blow up his cellphone running that much data through it, but it was fine. We’ll be doing the same thing Saturday (today was the other pharmacist’s day to work).

Duke Energy swears we will have power by midnight tonight. I’ll believe it when I see it. At least Starbucks came back online so I have WiFi if I drive down to the store every day.

This is the drive headed back towards our subdivision. It’s on the right where the car is turning onto State Park Road. You can see the Road Closed block up ahead, where a sinkhole developed when the tiny creek underneath the road was flooding around the culvert.