Scary Story from PrettyCheap

Our Etsy pal and fellow CCCOE Street Team member, PrettyCheap, sent in this story of a recent trip to Sea World that was foiled by the Fires...


Here's a little account of my personal experience with the fire and a picture from my front yard. (above)

Red world in my backyard (and my front yard) Sunday mid afternoon. It was 2pm about an hour after the Malibu had fire started. Now I live dozens and dozens of miles from Malibu. But it was scary.

I had planned a Seaworld trip with my kids for the Monday/Tuesday as school was out for the week. We headed to LA to stay with my MIL and my hubby and the dog went up to our weekend property (he had taken a couple days off). Good timing, so we thought, to escape the smoke. And there was a fire started far to the east near I5 as well to escape.

Down to LA, no problems there. Monday morn we got on the road after rush hour and went through another orange world in Orange County, (no pun this time). Not fun. Then into San Diego where a fire had started in Northeastern SD County. Our hotel was under mostly clear blue sky (except for a little smoke) but things were getting pretty hairy. More fires were starting by the hour and evacuations drove people to fill every room in the large area filled with hotels where we were.

Everyone was in good spirits but things were definitely getting worse. By Tues dawn I consulted with my husband via cell about the practicality of going to Seaworld. We absolutely bailed and got out of there by 7am practically flooring the gas pedal to make sure we could get north before something forced closure of I5.

We didn't stop until Sta Barbara and went to the zoo. Whew. Back home that evening things were in much better shape than I'd worried.

And the winds are gone. Thank goodness.

PrettyCheap will be entered in the drawing at the end of the week. PrettyCheap also raised the point that throwing money at a situation is not the only answer. "A gas card, grocery card, drug store card and the like would be hugely useful to people at this time probably." Not probably, definitely. Follow the links on the right up there to see what else you can do. If you find other links, let me know and I will post those up too!