So long Hurricane Irene... Hello Electricity!

Hurricane Irene rolled in late Saturday night ... and brought with it a whole bunch of rain, wind & destruction. I think we got about 10 inches of rain total. Winds were at around 40-50 mph (not as strong as they predicted luckily!). Northern NJ was right in the middle of it. We live in a higher elevation and don't typically get flooding here, although we do see some roads by us get flash flooding during a rainstorm sometimes. Our power went out around 4am on Sunday morning and we did not get power back until early Wednesday morning!

Luckily none of our monstrous trees came down with all the wind & rain... and we did not get even an inch of water in our basement! Then we started hearing about how many roads were closed due to down trees, down power lines and flooding. Every town. Many roads closed. Too many houses, roads and businesses flooded out. Areas that never flood were covered in water. Major highways flooded out and closed down. Sinkholes. Roads being washed away. Amazing. This kind of stuff isn't supposed to happen in NJ. We drove 1 mile on Sunday morning to our friend's house (they had power!) and we were diverted a few times due to down power lines and a down tree. It was a disaster zone.


Click here for a Facebook link to News12 for some incredible pictures of Hurricane Irene aftermath and flooding.


So, what did we do during the power outage you ask??
When we realized about 750,000 people in NJ had no power and there were hundreds of down power lines & trees, Brian called Residence Inn and reserved a room for us. No power meant no water. No way to heat up food. No way to keep food in the fridge. No way to bathe. No way to live with a baby. So off we went to the Residence about 10 minutes from our house with child & dog in tow. (They allow doggies!)

We ended up packing up the expensive food (meat, milk, etc) and brought it to the fridge in our hotel room (it was a studio with a full kitchen). Brian reserved the room through this Saturday since we did not know how long we would be without power- and JCP&L couldn't offer us any ETA due to the staggering number of outages. Heck we couldn't even get a live person on the phone.We just knew we were not getting power back for a while. Thank goodness for Smartphones let me tell you. That was the way we stayed in touch with the world. We were able to follow along with the local feeds to get updates on what was going on in our area.

We ended up moving back home Wednesday morning once power was restored. After 3 nights in the hotel, I was never so happy to come home. We made out OK in the end since we did not have damage to our house. So many people in our area had damage to their houses & property, and lost everything. Thank God we ended up relatively unscathed.


We did get to spend some quality family time together... and of course I was there to take the pictures! ( I would like to add this note; Julianna was addicted to her Binky while we were riding out the power outage in the hotel room. I think she was stressed out from the change in scenery! LOL)

 Brian putting Pepper's life jacket on so she she could be ready for the hurricane.

 Julianna figured out how to get in ...

...and out of the bath tub in the hotel room.  (Don't worry, she was fine!)

Daddy playing with Julianna on the bed!

She loved it! 

Daddy & Julianna jumping on the hotel bed - What fun!! 

Daddy walloping Julianna with big fluffy pillows - she was giggling up a storm! 

Hysterical laughing after playing pillow fight!

Daddy throwing Julianna into a pile of pillows! Woooooo! 

 You can clearly see who had the best time!