Madison & Brayden: Hurricane Matthew

A couple of weeks ago, Hurricane Matthew was planned to come up the east coast and hit Charleston pretty hard. Since Brayden and I are from the west coast, we didn't really know what to expect. On Tuesday, the governor of South Carolina declared an evacuation for Charleston on Wednesday afternoon. As soon as that happened on Tuesday, a lot of people left right away because the schools, work, and everything was cancelled! I went to work on Wednesday because Brayden and I still weren't sure if we would evacuate. All day Wednesday at work was spent "hurricane proofing" the office. Which basically meant bagging up all of the computers, client work papers, etc. After I got home from work, we were still on the fence about leaving, but we figured we had plenty of time to make the decision because it wasn't supposed to hit until Friday afternoon.

Thursday rolled around, Brayden got up early to study, I of course slept ha. Later that day, my parents told us that one of our friends from La Verne, the Fertig had a sister in North Carolina that said we could stay with them. So we thought about it and realized that if we have a place to stay we should probably just go so that we were safe. So we packed up, moved a few things that were near our windows into a safer place and were off to North Carolina!

On Friday I was able to live out my teenage dream! We went to Wilmington, NC to look at some of the locations that One Tree Hill was filmed. I was absolutely obsessed with OTH when I was younger, I watched it with my sister, and occasionally my dad and brother Tanner would sit with us and watch it. My dad is secretly a sucker for chick flicks/dramas, but his excuse of why he watched it was "it'sall about basketball, it's a basketball show!" Yeah right...but I was not about to correct him, if that's what he believed to watch it with me.

But before we went to tour One Tree Hill, we took a pit stop at the high school where Michael Jordan went. We both felt a little weird/stalkerish that we were on a high school campus that we knew no one. So as soon as we got a picture of the gym we booked it out of there! I also learned that Michael Jordan's old high school is the gym where they filmed the high school basketball games for One Tree Hill! So that was a total bonus of visiting that high school. When we got to downtown Wilmington, we visited the place Nathan and Haley had their first tutoring session, walked along the Riverwalk, drove across the bridge, went to the river court, and saw a couple of stores that were in the show. Unfortunately, they tore out the River Court. I was so bummed! But there was a cute little gazebo in it's place now and people wrote quotes from the show all over the wood. I honestly don't know why they tore out the basketball court. Brayden and I both think that it was such a cool place to have a basketball court near the river. I am so happy that Brayden was okay with taking a tour of One Tree Hill!

The rest of the weekend was spent hanging out with the sweet family that took us in. They were so nice and welcoming! We had a blast spending time with them and getting to know them better. They were the best hosts and made us feel at home!

Luckily, the hurricane did not hit Charleston as hard as they had originally thought. We got home on Sunday and were only without power for an hour or so. During that hour that the power was off, Brayden and I decided to take a nap. A few minutes after laying down, the fire alarm went off. We jumped out of bed so fast, but we quickly realized that it was just going off because the power came back on. The only thing that was still out was our cable and internet...and if you ask Brayden and me how we felt about AT&T for those two weeks we were without it we would not have good things to say about them. But it all got fixed and we were happy campers after that!

We were so thankful to return back home to no damage to our apartment. Hurricane Matthew did not hit Charleston as hard as it was expected and we are so grateful that everyone was okay. We were so fortunate, and we are praying for everyone that was affected!