Too much excitement

What a day! After a relatively uneventful day, we headed to Bandon for Caleb's baseball game. For the first time this season, they used a pitching machine for the first few innings (kudos to the coaches!!), eliminating the runs walked in (and there have been many this year). On Caleb's second time up to bat, he hit an awesome grounder that brought a runner in and took Caleb to first base. Let me tell you, when the boy connects, he really slams that ball!

The boys pitched the last two innings and did quite well. Our team has also greatly improved in the field and it really showed tonight! They won 9-1! It was after 8:00 when the game got over, but we had to celebrate the first win of the season, so we headed to Dairy Queen. The kids sat down with their Blizzards and I was standing at the counter waiting for my onion rings. A lady came into the D.Q. announcing that the entire coast was being evacuated because of a tsunami warning. She left and I thought, "...yeah, right....whatever".

I went to our table and was opening those irritating little ketchup packets (why do they make them so small?) when suddenly the wail of the warning siren started blaring through the air. We grabbed our food and headed for the van, but I wasn't really sure where to go. Bandon doesn't have obvious hills and high spots the way Gold Beach does. I figured away from the ocean was a good start. There were cars everywhere--heading north, heading south, flashers on, pulling out of driveways--but no clear consensus on which way to go. In front of us was a pick-up with people in the back, one of which was a crying woman. A Coast Guard helicopter was flying over the ocean.

I tried to call Brad (who was home) to ask for advice, but the cell signal was jammed and I couldn't call out. I saw a sign for the hospital and figured they should know a safe place, so we went there. By this time, the siren--still blaring--was joined by a repeating recording: "MOVE TO HIGH GROUND. LEAVE LOW-LYING AREAS IMMEDIATELY." It was very scary. I ran into the hospital to find all three panic-faced receptionists on the phone. Finally one talked to me and said she thought the hospital was high ground. It did not seem high at all to me--and it was only a few blocks from the ocean.

The kids and I prayed together and decided to head out of Bandon; the choice was confirmed to be a good one when we passed a Tsunami Evacuation Route sign pointing us to continue on. We headed a few miles east on Hwy. 42S, but the river follows that road, so I didn't feel very safe there either. Eventually we found a farmhouse perched on the side of a hill, so we went up the driveway. I asked the people outside if we could stay there and they showed me where to park to leave room for the other cars that had followed me up.

At this point, the Emergency Broadcast System announced that the waves were expected to hit Charleston at 8:48. We looked at the clock in the van: 8:47. The kids and I decided we couldn't be too high, so we got out of the van and hiked up the rest of the hill to the tippy-top. We had to crawl through two barbed-wire fences, but we ended up in what finally felt like a safe place to me. Even there, several miles outside city limits, we could hear the warning sirens as they continued to blast.

Finally, the very nice teenage boy from the farmhouse came up the hill to tell us they'd gotten the all-clear from the Coast Guard. He walked us back down to the van, opened the gates for us (gates!--wish we'd noticed them on the way up) and was very sweet and comforting. Brad called me on my cell and said there was still some danger, but he thought we should head home. We loaded up, and he called a few minutes later to say that the warning had been lifted.

When I got home and checked the news websites, I was amazed to find such a calm little headline. If I'd have been in Kansas reading that headline, I'd not have given it a second thought. However, living through those moments of sirens, cars, and confusion made it quite a major event to us.

Julianne thought the whole thing was cool.