Wet.Wet.Wet (no, not the band from the 80's)
Sep 23, 2013, 10:41 pm
#1
Moderator, Trip Reports
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Denver, CO
Programs: UA GS-2MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 3,715
Wet.Wet.Wet (no, not the band from the 80's)
Man, what a week. First my Mom has been in town. Then Colorado had a little rain. Then a lot of rain. So much so in fact that if Noah was still alive, he would have built a bigger boat. Or gone home, had a lie down and then started again a week later.
It started innocently enough.
My wife threatened me with death if I traveled while Mrs. Eightblack Snr was in town. Like all husbands who have suffered 15-years of marital bliss, I promptly ignored her and agreed to a work meeting in ATL.
My reasoning was that “what could possibly go wrong in 2-days?”
Turns out quite a lot in fact.
Perhaps lets back things up a bit. Since we moved to the US at the start of this year, my mother has done the whole “woe is me” sob story on the phone. Or in person when I have been back in Australia. Which has been a lot this year.
She would say to me…
“I don’t know when I will see the grandkids again. Your father and I might not be alive in another year…
My ears would prick up when she would say this, quite fascinated with my mothers now sixth sense at being able to predict not only her demise but my fathers as well.
“Why, do you feel ill?” I casually enquired
“No” she snapped
“Are you dying?”
“Don’t be ridiculous? I take too many tablets to feel sick” she barked
“Did Dad have another heart attack or is he planning to have one soon?”
“Not that I know of”.
And then she went on, “Well, it was his fault the last time”.
For those of you who are even slightly interested, my old man did in fact have a little heart attack not long ago. He was at home having lunch with my mother (of course) and my sister and her family. He complained of chest pains and my mother and sister promptly dismissed his complaints, told him that he shouldn’t have eaten as quickly as he did, and that he should go upstairs and lie down.
Begrudgingly, he followed their advice.
Meanwhile, my sister and Mom didn’t miss a beat and kept talking. They could both talk the leg off a chair and it is because of them, phone companies in Australia have introduced a fair use policy on those unlimited minute voice plans.
Fast forward then.
My mother in her wisdom decides to go check on my old man and discovers that he is in fact, quite ill. To the point of yelling out to my sister that it might be a good idea if he did get medical attention.
“Should we call the paramedics?” she said, with a mild sense of urgency
“No we don’t need to” my sister responded
“But he’s turning blue and clutching his chest” my mother observed
“But we don’t want to annoy those nice people”
“He probably has something stuck in his throat. Silly old fool”
“Why don’t we drive him ourselves” my mother suggested
So they bundled my 80 year-old father into the car and headed for the local hospital.
But not before they probably had a quick tidy up and finished the dishes. Then it started.
“Where are you going to park?”, my old man barked, horrified at the thought that he might have to pay for parking, citing that the hospital was in fact a pack of charlatans given the exorbitant fees they charged for casual parking.
“We’ll park in Emergency”
“We cant do that”
“Yes we can”
“No we cant as we forgot the disabled permit”
So they drove around for 15-minutes, looking for an appropriate parking space, while my old man yelled obscenities at them both, through now very blue lips.
Eventually they managed to get him into Emergency and as soon as the triage nurse person saw a 5-foot Asian man hurling insults at this wife and daughter, while trying to self-administer heart massage, they knew something was wrong.
An hour later, my old man was under the knife and a stent was suitably installed and he was as we say in Australia, “right as rain”.
My mother and sister, and my fathers 3 sisters all thought this is a terrible imposition because they had to take turns in taking him meals as the cranky old cuss refused to eat the hospital food.
He would say to me “I’ve just survived a heart attack and now they’re trying to kill me with this rubbish”
Or something like this.
Anyway, since this episode, and because I didn’t want to hear my mother drone on any further, I agreed to bring her to Colorado. As you would expect, our 10 and 12 year old children were not as elated as my mother was at the pending visit. We braced ourselves.
I burned some AA miles for a J redemption on CX from MEL-HKG-LAX and then a wee revenue ticket from LAX to DEN would complete the journey.
Foolishly I decided I would meet She Who Must Be Obeyed in LAX and that we would spend some quality mother and son time and we could fly back to DEN together. But the silly old cow took a sleeping pill as soon as she got to the hotel in LAX and the only way you could have woken her was if the building collapsed. Or if you had connected her hearing aids to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear reactor.
So, where was I?
That’s right. A work trip. To ATL. And a slightly angry wife. And a mother who said as I departed “I’ll try and stay out of the way, and incidentally, which wine can we drink…?”
The domestic trip was uneventful enough. The steam driven IT system that AA uses started to sputter text driven messages a few days out advising me that my upgrades had cleared. Good on AA EXP status is all I say.
A quick 737 hop to DFW from DEN, then a Mad Dog to Atlanta, then a quick stay at a Hyatt, then a client meeting on Thurs morning, then do it all again in reverse. The travel that is.
Oh, and a wonderfully good steak in between. And an upgrade at the Hertz desk to something called a Cadillac CTS. Whatever the hell that is. Looks like it got squashed in a lift is all I can say.
Anyway.
The brief travel interlude was North American travel bliss. If there is such a thing. Nice weather. Nice people. A couple of very, very stiff Gin and Tonics onboard and some excellent conversations with fellow seat mates.
Funnily enough, the crew we had from DEN the day prior, was flying us back the next day. Very weird. The FA in F was a tall young man with astonishingly white teeth. He was in a bad mood when he started and I casually said to my seat companion, that it might be a long journey.
But he (the FA) seemed to delight in pouring the strongest drinks I have ever had onboard a domestic flight. When I told him this, he clutched both hands together and beamed with pride. And then proceed to apologize for his surliness and blamed it all on someone called Gustavo. Not sure if it was his boyfriend, girlfriend. Or pet hamster. But I digress.
Some of you will be aware that I treat the US weather patterns with disdain and to be honest, this summer was wearing a little thin on me and when the rain started coming down, I was thankful for it.
I cant even remember now if it was raining as I left home the day prior, but a very cute weather girl on our local TV station started to wave her arms frantically when they cut to vision of a bespectacled man and his Doppler.
For those people who aren’t based in the US, Colorado is not in the flood plains. No one even bothers with flood insurance and I don’t even think the local State Farm or Allstate office could give you an estimate even if you did want it. I have no idea where the floodplains are – but the locals tell me we aint in ‘em.
What happened, in short, was apparently a one in five hundred year event. I’m not sure how a weather person calculates such things, especially here in Colorado but according to some very smart people at CU (who weren’t stoned at the time) they have the math workings to prove it.
Twenty-one inches is the number you need to write down. Or 1.75 feet. Take your pick. That’s how much rain fell in parts of Colorado over the course of a few days. Basically, a years worth in one big hit.
A forecaster from the National Weather Service called it “biblical”. Although I can assure you that when the water started filling up peoples basements, washing away businesses, cars, bikes, dogs and cats and everything else in between, the last thing locals were reciting were chapters from The Good Book.
The town we live in was one of 3 within our immediate area that got hit.
As I was winging my way home from ATL, I started to take notice of what was going on back in Colorado. You could sense something was happening when the delays started occurring in DFW. We had made good time coming in from ATL as the Mad Dog pilot flew that thing like he stole it.
I even thought about trying to jump on the earlier flight to DEN – as it was only 2 gates away from my flight and was leaving an hour earlier. But it was packed and the agents working that flight had obviously had better days.
It ended up leaving the same time as we did anyway.
My iPhone started sending me text messages and if you put our zip code into the weather.com site – all you saw was a sea of red alert messages which ended with “runaway, quickly”.
Or something like this.
As we pushed back from the gate at DFW, my wife called me and told me that she had been given the instruction to evacuate. She told me not to come home and to stay at the airport. Then she promptly hung up.
Now, this is not the first time my better half has told me not to come home and stay at the airport, but it is the first time she has issued this sort of edict under these rather gloomy circumstances.
Evacuate. Really? In our little town.
Then I thought of my mother. This is a woman who gets stressed if you put the sheets on your bed without ironing them first. (who does that by the way??)
I had visions of her clutching a chardonnay bottle and a straw, with the kids, the cat, the dog, the gekkos (and whatever the hell other sort of animal my daughter has jammed in her room) all piling into my wife's car heading for wherever it was you evacuate to.
My wife then sent me another text telling me that she had tried to book a hotel locally but as you would expect, everything was sold out. Then the next message read “going to local high school”.
Emergency services like The Red Cross had already set the schools up with cots, and there was an abundance of food and water and a lot of people yelling into walkie talkies.
Because we had wifi on board on the flight to DEN, I had decided to make evacuation plans of my own. I’m sorry, but the thought of sleeping in a school hall on a canvas stretcher with chopsticks for legs and 250 of my closest neighbors was not my idea of an evacuation.
So I managed to cajole the Hyatt website to give me 2 rooms at the Hyatt Denver Tech for a very reasonable rate. But it would only let me book one night, as there was, as I discovered later, a Star Wars convention on in town and the hotel was booked solid for the weekend.
Amazingly we were able to land in DEN and as we flew in, I started to get an idea of just what had happened. Water was everywhere. I mean literally everywhere.
As you would expect, Murphy’s Law arrived as soon as we did. Another plane was at our gate and they couldn’t find those people who do literally wave their arms for a living and guide the planes in and out of their parking stands. So we had to wait. And then wait some more. I was not the only one losing the will to live by this stage.
Then they couldn’t get the aerobridge thing to work so more arm waving, yelling into radio headsets and then a torrent of profanity by the pilot at the ground staff (who must have pressed the PA switch by mistake.) Understandable really. And much cheering by fellow passengers when he had finished his tirade…
As I was driving my car out of the airport, I was overcome by a sense of déjŕ vu. Some of you might remember a little incident I had a with a snow storm a little while back.
So here I was again, in a car, driving towards a weather disturbed area. And as I was hurtling north on E470, I kept saying to myself “its not so bad, just a little rain, the roads are fine” And they were. Where I was.
I jumped off E470 and headed north on I-25. Again, couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Then I jumped off again onto a little highway (52) – which connects to 287. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. Or as I like to say, where things went pear shaped. Royally in fact.
About a mile up this little highway (heading West), the road was blocked by a police car with 2 very large men with guns. Road was flooded completely. It was hard to see. Like black ice. Only instead of careening off into a ditch – when you hit a sheet of water 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, you sort of end up being sucked into a boggy vortex.
South to another detour, more men with guns and then another. And another. And a couple of hairy moments when the car went through puddles of water which were more like moats around a castle than small pools of H20.
Because it was now dark – as in pitch black, it was hard to fathom just how much rain had fallen. My normal 45-minute commute from the airport to home had now taken more than double that and I was no closer to it than when I started.
My wife was telling me at this point that I was in fact a moron for trying to get to our town and that the authorities were now moving them from the school they were first evacuated to – to another school 7 miles away (and a lot closer to where the water was coming from).
In my usually relaxed manner, I told her casually that all was well – and that I had made reservations at the Hyatt. Except for one thing. They couldn’t get there. There was also a small matter of getting past the Emergency Services people. Ok, fair enough. Easy as pie to smuggle 2 kids and a couple of small animals into an SUV and head for the hills. But not so easy when you have a 73 year old Mother In Law in tow, with an intravenous alcohol injection into her arm…
It got worse. I need to make sure I remember things in order before I tell you the rest…
It started innocently enough.
My wife threatened me with death if I traveled while Mrs. Eightblack Snr was in town. Like all husbands who have suffered 15-years of marital bliss, I promptly ignored her and agreed to a work meeting in ATL.
My reasoning was that “what could possibly go wrong in 2-days?”
Turns out quite a lot in fact.
Perhaps lets back things up a bit. Since we moved to the US at the start of this year, my mother has done the whole “woe is me” sob story on the phone. Or in person when I have been back in Australia. Which has been a lot this year.
She would say to me…
“I don’t know when I will see the grandkids again. Your father and I might not be alive in another year…
My ears would prick up when she would say this, quite fascinated with my mothers now sixth sense at being able to predict not only her demise but my fathers as well.
“Why, do you feel ill?” I casually enquired
“No” she snapped
“Are you dying?”
“Don’t be ridiculous? I take too many tablets to feel sick” she barked
“Did Dad have another heart attack or is he planning to have one soon?”
“Not that I know of”.
And then she went on, “Well, it was his fault the last time”.
For those of you who are even slightly interested, my old man did in fact have a little heart attack not long ago. He was at home having lunch with my mother (of course) and my sister and her family. He complained of chest pains and my mother and sister promptly dismissed his complaints, told him that he shouldn’t have eaten as quickly as he did, and that he should go upstairs and lie down.
Begrudgingly, he followed their advice.
Meanwhile, my sister and Mom didn’t miss a beat and kept talking. They could both talk the leg off a chair and it is because of them, phone companies in Australia have introduced a fair use policy on those unlimited minute voice plans.
Fast forward then.
My mother in her wisdom decides to go check on my old man and discovers that he is in fact, quite ill. To the point of yelling out to my sister that it might be a good idea if he did get medical attention.
“Should we call the paramedics?” she said, with a mild sense of urgency
“No we don’t need to” my sister responded
“But he’s turning blue and clutching his chest” my mother observed
“But we don’t want to annoy those nice people”
“He probably has something stuck in his throat. Silly old fool”
“Why don’t we drive him ourselves” my mother suggested
So they bundled my 80 year-old father into the car and headed for the local hospital.
But not before they probably had a quick tidy up and finished the dishes. Then it started.
“Where are you going to park?”, my old man barked, horrified at the thought that he might have to pay for parking, citing that the hospital was in fact a pack of charlatans given the exorbitant fees they charged for casual parking.
“We’ll park in Emergency”
“We cant do that”
“Yes we can”
“No we cant as we forgot the disabled permit”
So they drove around for 15-minutes, looking for an appropriate parking space, while my old man yelled obscenities at them both, through now very blue lips.
Eventually they managed to get him into Emergency and as soon as the triage nurse person saw a 5-foot Asian man hurling insults at this wife and daughter, while trying to self-administer heart massage, they knew something was wrong.
An hour later, my old man was under the knife and a stent was suitably installed and he was as we say in Australia, “right as rain”.
My mother and sister, and my fathers 3 sisters all thought this is a terrible imposition because they had to take turns in taking him meals as the cranky old cuss refused to eat the hospital food.
He would say to me “I’ve just survived a heart attack and now they’re trying to kill me with this rubbish”
Or something like this.
Anyway, since this episode, and because I didn’t want to hear my mother drone on any further, I agreed to bring her to Colorado. As you would expect, our 10 and 12 year old children were not as elated as my mother was at the pending visit. We braced ourselves.
I burned some AA miles for a J redemption on CX from MEL-HKG-LAX and then a wee revenue ticket from LAX to DEN would complete the journey.
Foolishly I decided I would meet She Who Must Be Obeyed in LAX and that we would spend some quality mother and son time and we could fly back to DEN together. But the silly old cow took a sleeping pill as soon as she got to the hotel in LAX and the only way you could have woken her was if the building collapsed. Or if you had connected her hearing aids to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear reactor.
So, where was I?
That’s right. A work trip. To ATL. And a slightly angry wife. And a mother who said as I departed “I’ll try and stay out of the way, and incidentally, which wine can we drink…?”
The domestic trip was uneventful enough. The steam driven IT system that AA uses started to sputter text driven messages a few days out advising me that my upgrades had cleared. Good on AA EXP status is all I say.
A quick 737 hop to DFW from DEN, then a Mad Dog to Atlanta, then a quick stay at a Hyatt, then a client meeting on Thurs morning, then do it all again in reverse. The travel that is.
Oh, and a wonderfully good steak in between. And an upgrade at the Hertz desk to something called a Cadillac CTS. Whatever the hell that is. Looks like it got squashed in a lift is all I can say.
Anyway.
The brief travel interlude was North American travel bliss. If there is such a thing. Nice weather. Nice people. A couple of very, very stiff Gin and Tonics onboard and some excellent conversations with fellow seat mates.
Funnily enough, the crew we had from DEN the day prior, was flying us back the next day. Very weird. The FA in F was a tall young man with astonishingly white teeth. He was in a bad mood when he started and I casually said to my seat companion, that it might be a long journey.
But he (the FA) seemed to delight in pouring the strongest drinks I have ever had onboard a domestic flight. When I told him this, he clutched both hands together and beamed with pride. And then proceed to apologize for his surliness and blamed it all on someone called Gustavo. Not sure if it was his boyfriend, girlfriend. Or pet hamster. But I digress.
Some of you will be aware that I treat the US weather patterns with disdain and to be honest, this summer was wearing a little thin on me and when the rain started coming down, I was thankful for it.
I cant even remember now if it was raining as I left home the day prior, but a very cute weather girl on our local TV station started to wave her arms frantically when they cut to vision of a bespectacled man and his Doppler.
For those people who aren’t based in the US, Colorado is not in the flood plains. No one even bothers with flood insurance and I don’t even think the local State Farm or Allstate office could give you an estimate even if you did want it. I have no idea where the floodplains are – but the locals tell me we aint in ‘em.
What happened, in short, was apparently a one in five hundred year event. I’m not sure how a weather person calculates such things, especially here in Colorado but according to some very smart people at CU (who weren’t stoned at the time) they have the math workings to prove it.
Twenty-one inches is the number you need to write down. Or 1.75 feet. Take your pick. That’s how much rain fell in parts of Colorado over the course of a few days. Basically, a years worth in one big hit.
A forecaster from the National Weather Service called it “biblical”. Although I can assure you that when the water started filling up peoples basements, washing away businesses, cars, bikes, dogs and cats and everything else in between, the last thing locals were reciting were chapters from The Good Book.
The town we live in was one of 3 within our immediate area that got hit.
As I was winging my way home from ATL, I started to take notice of what was going on back in Colorado. You could sense something was happening when the delays started occurring in DFW. We had made good time coming in from ATL as the Mad Dog pilot flew that thing like he stole it.
I even thought about trying to jump on the earlier flight to DEN – as it was only 2 gates away from my flight and was leaving an hour earlier. But it was packed and the agents working that flight had obviously had better days.
It ended up leaving the same time as we did anyway.
My iPhone started sending me text messages and if you put our zip code into the weather.com site – all you saw was a sea of red alert messages which ended with “runaway, quickly”.
Or something like this.
As we pushed back from the gate at DFW, my wife called me and told me that she had been given the instruction to evacuate. She told me not to come home and to stay at the airport. Then she promptly hung up.
Now, this is not the first time my better half has told me not to come home and stay at the airport, but it is the first time she has issued this sort of edict under these rather gloomy circumstances.
Evacuate. Really? In our little town.
Then I thought of my mother. This is a woman who gets stressed if you put the sheets on your bed without ironing them first. (who does that by the way??)
I had visions of her clutching a chardonnay bottle and a straw, with the kids, the cat, the dog, the gekkos (and whatever the hell other sort of animal my daughter has jammed in her room) all piling into my wife's car heading for wherever it was you evacuate to.
My wife then sent me another text telling me that she had tried to book a hotel locally but as you would expect, everything was sold out. Then the next message read “going to local high school”.
Emergency services like The Red Cross had already set the schools up with cots, and there was an abundance of food and water and a lot of people yelling into walkie talkies.
Because we had wifi on board on the flight to DEN, I had decided to make evacuation plans of my own. I’m sorry, but the thought of sleeping in a school hall on a canvas stretcher with chopsticks for legs and 250 of my closest neighbors was not my idea of an evacuation.
So I managed to cajole the Hyatt website to give me 2 rooms at the Hyatt Denver Tech for a very reasonable rate. But it would only let me book one night, as there was, as I discovered later, a Star Wars convention on in town and the hotel was booked solid for the weekend.
Amazingly we were able to land in DEN and as we flew in, I started to get an idea of just what had happened. Water was everywhere. I mean literally everywhere.
As you would expect, Murphy’s Law arrived as soon as we did. Another plane was at our gate and they couldn’t find those people who do literally wave their arms for a living and guide the planes in and out of their parking stands. So we had to wait. And then wait some more. I was not the only one losing the will to live by this stage.
Then they couldn’t get the aerobridge thing to work so more arm waving, yelling into radio headsets and then a torrent of profanity by the pilot at the ground staff (who must have pressed the PA switch by mistake.) Understandable really. And much cheering by fellow passengers when he had finished his tirade…
As I was driving my car out of the airport, I was overcome by a sense of déjŕ vu. Some of you might remember a little incident I had a with a snow storm a little while back.
So here I was again, in a car, driving towards a weather disturbed area. And as I was hurtling north on E470, I kept saying to myself “its not so bad, just a little rain, the roads are fine” And they were. Where I was.
I jumped off E470 and headed north on I-25. Again, couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Then I jumped off again onto a little highway (52) – which connects to 287. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. Or as I like to say, where things went pear shaped. Royally in fact.
About a mile up this little highway (heading West), the road was blocked by a police car with 2 very large men with guns. Road was flooded completely. It was hard to see. Like black ice. Only instead of careening off into a ditch – when you hit a sheet of water 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, you sort of end up being sucked into a boggy vortex.
South to another detour, more men with guns and then another. And another. And a couple of hairy moments when the car went through puddles of water which were more like moats around a castle than small pools of H20.
Because it was now dark – as in pitch black, it was hard to fathom just how much rain had fallen. My normal 45-minute commute from the airport to home had now taken more than double that and I was no closer to it than when I started.
My wife was telling me at this point that I was in fact a moron for trying to get to our town and that the authorities were now moving them from the school they were first evacuated to – to another school 7 miles away (and a lot closer to where the water was coming from).
In my usually relaxed manner, I told her casually that all was well – and that I had made reservations at the Hyatt. Except for one thing. They couldn’t get there. There was also a small matter of getting past the Emergency Services people. Ok, fair enough. Easy as pie to smuggle 2 kids and a couple of small animals into an SUV and head for the hills. But not so easy when you have a 73 year old Mother In Law in tow, with an intravenous alcohol injection into her arm…
It got worse. I need to make sure I remember things in order before I tell you the rest…
Sep 23, 2013, 11:05 pm
#3
Join Date: Sep 1999
Location: SF Bay Area
Programs: UA 1K MM, Accor Plat, Htz PC, Natl ExEm, other random status
Posts: 2,876
Deleted because of the dangers of posting "Hooray" sorts of messages in response to an eightblack TR without reading it all the way through - one winds up making unintentionally (and unfortunately) ironic comments...
Greg
Greg
Last edited by greg99; Sep 23, 2013 at 11:11 pm
I can grin because I know everything will end well.. Right..?
Sep 24, 2013, 6:31 am
#5
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: BTR/MSY
Programs: AA EXP, Hyatt Globalist, Marriott LTP, Hilton Gold
Posts: 1,258
Hi eightblack, thanks for the entertaining albeit sombering read. I lived along the US Gulf Coast most of my life, so I completely understand what you and your family went through. Hope everything turns out ok.
Sep 24, 2013, 8:42 am
#6
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: EAR
Posts: 135
Hi, eightblack!! As a native of FNL, you were in my neck of the woods trying to get home. I have followed the worst flooding in years from here in EAR, where I currently reside. The main thing is that our families are safe.
I can't wait for the continuation of this hilarious report.
Just be glad it wasn't snow. You'd be buried in snow up to 18' depending on where you are.
I can't wait for the continuation of this hilarious report.
Just be glad it wasn't snow. You'd be buried in snow up to 18' depending on where you are.
Sep 24, 2013, 4:56 pm
#10
Moderator, Trip Reports
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Denver, CO
Programs: UA GS-2MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 3,715
I did actually end up making it home - but my car looked like a drowned rat.
The family on the other hand decided to stay at the shelter while I surveyed the neighborhood. While the order to evacuate had been given, apparently you didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to - but the onus then rests with you if your house gets swept away. You can’t very well expect the National Guard to come save your sorry arse if you defied the original order. It’s a bit hard to argue the point with some angry woman from FEMA a few weeks later…
“Hello, I want to sue”
“What for?”
“Because no one came to rescue me and my house and the entire contents are now in another zip code”
“Did you not evacuate when the order was given?”
“No”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t hear the door bell ring”
“But we went round the streets in a humvee with a very angry woman yelling into a microphone, telling you all to leave immediately”
“I thought that was my ex wife”
About half the neighbors stayed and half left. Directly opposite us is a lovely old retired couple. I think you call them empty nesters. Lets call them Tim and Betty. I have become great friends with them both, especially the husband as he used to be a handyman in New York before retiring in Colorado, and once when I went over to borrow some sort of tool, his tiny framed wife popped her head into the garage and bellowed in that lovely Jewish accent, that if her husband doesn't have the tool I wanted, then it’s because they haven’t actually made it.
His garage is a temple. Temple DeWalt. He can only fit 2 cars in his 3 car garage, because of all the crap he has.
During one of my heated conversations with my wife during the all the drama, I asked her to go check on the elderly pair. She said that shortly after the evacuation order was given, they were standing there in the driveway arguing like only a couple who have been married 40 years can, about which car to take and which car to leave behind.
“My car's older, let’s take it”
“But my car rides better and besides, your car smells like a swamp”
“We need to get going”
“Maybe I should pack some sandwiches”
“We're only going 20 mins down the road”
“Should we leave a light on?”
“What for, the place is about to become a water filled wasteland”
And on it went apparently for what seemed an eternity. My wife reckons that as she drove off with the car packed to the gunwales they were still going strong.
In the 20-odd years that this couple have lived in Colorado, they have never seen or experienced anything like this. Ever.
Then there's the neighbor diagonally opposite us. Lets call him Dave, because that is in fact, his real name.
Dave is also retired. He too is married but unlike the other couple, no one has actually ever seen his wife. Maybe he buried her in the back yard. I have no idea. Anyway, He constantly complains how much of a pain his wife is and when we are all out of earshot of any one resembling a spouse, we all nod in agreement, and concur that in fact, most wives are difficult and don’t understand us at all.
On the surface, Dave could be considered rather eccentric. My son loves him because he has this wonderful old yellow convertible Corvette which he charges around the neighborhood on sunny days. He refuses to drive it in winter or when it rains. Makes perfect sense.
Anyway he took No 1 Son for a drive and junior was impressed not only with the car but at the fact that Dave waved and whistled to every female they drove past.
“Dad, Dave sure knows a lot of women”
“Does he have more than one wife?”
“No, this isn't Utah”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind”
When I first met Dave, the first thing he said to me is "Hey Aussie, want a beer...?" Not wanting to be rude - I naturally accepted even though I am but a very light drinker.
He then asked if I wanted to see his collection of guns. Beer in hand, I nodded in the affirmative.
It wasn’t so much a collection as a military grade arsenal. Forty weapons and counting. And a reloading room which could cater to the needs of the entire state police force.
“Dave, what exactly are you afraid of?” I said with genuine curiosity
“Absolutely nothing” he replied rather curtly.
Later I learned that Dave is indeed, some sort of competition grade skeet shooter. Maybe its sporting clays. Same same. I forget. But you get the idea. Essentially, he rarely misses at what he aims at.
Colorado, for those of you who don’t know, has this thing called a "Make My Day law". Apparently, if someone breaks into your home and threatens you or your family or your marijuana plants, you are in fact, allowed to riddle them with bullets.
But the subtle difference between lets say Michigan and Colorado is that in Michigan they wouldn’t stop shooting until they ran out of ammo or the Po-Po showed up.
In Colorado, because we are a culturally enlightened state where dope is now quite legal and the love of micro-brewed beer is something of an art form, if you broke into someone like Daves house, I am 110% certain that he would in fact, shoot you in the head (and wouldn’t miss).
But the critical difference is that you because you are in Colorado, the home of the Rocky Mountains, you would be given a joint to smoke to calm your nerves and some sort of exotic IPA to drink, while waiting for the paramedics to arrive.
Or something like this.
I have no idea how we arrived here, but by this stage in our relationship, I think you understand. Sort of.
So, evacution of our little town was in full swing. Some neighbors stayed. And some ran away. Dave, as you might imagine, stayed because as he said to me later "someone has to stay behind and protect the street"
My wife and I argued back and forth for the next hour and by this time, I was absolutely certain that my mothers wine bottle had run dry.
In the end, we decided that if we were going to perish in the 500-year flood, we should do it together, so I convinced the family to escape Camp Uncomfortable and head home.
While I think it a little rude of me to mention the town my wife and kids were evacuated to – it is still worth mentioning. This is a town that we originally looked at living in. It is about 7 miles from where we are now. Terrible place. Full of angry women with short haircuts.
I have no idea what the authorities were thinking when they moved from the perfect safety of the school they were in to this other towns school. Now, I’m no geography student but as far as I could tell (and so could Google Maps), this town was 7 miles closer to the foothills, which was the original source of the water.
Maybe they were high. Or drunk. Or both. It is the only plausible explanation.
We live a few hundred yards from a quaint little park, which has a little creek running through it. The kids often play down there and take the dog. Because the dog lacks intelligence (essentially it is as dumb as a box of rocks), both it and the kids come back looking like they competed in the local mud wrestling tournament.
However this little creek grew a giant set of creek testicles when the rain came down and it was now a raging river. All the playground equipment got swept into the next suburb (literally). There is a row of houses facing the park and much to the horror of the local residents, the water started to lap at the back doors (literally). Then their basements started to drink water like an alcoholic at a Hollywood after party.
I have no idea why, but I knew we would be ok. We live on a slight incline and our house is elevated – so by my reckoning, the water level would need to rise another 30-feet at least before our house would be in danger.
When the family pulled into the drive, there were some very unhappy faces.
The kids for one thought that the shelter was a great place. Free soda. Hot Dogs. And plenty of kids to play with.
My mother on the other hand was hyper ventilating as a result of disobeying the law. She was convinced that she would be deported as soon as the authorities could find her. And my wife was unhappy at having to move yet again, even though she agreed that those people at this special town were a bunch of very special people (translation, a piano had obviously fallen on their heads when they were very young).
But we were all together. Even the dog and the cat. And the gekkos. And now all we had to do was wait. Which is what we did.
I promptly took an Ambien and went to bed. My mother on the other hand peered out the front room window for most of the night, with Dave giving her a wink from the other side of the road, every 15-mins.
It was going to be a long night...
The family on the other hand decided to stay at the shelter while I surveyed the neighborhood. While the order to evacuate had been given, apparently you didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to - but the onus then rests with you if your house gets swept away. You can’t very well expect the National Guard to come save your sorry arse if you defied the original order. It’s a bit hard to argue the point with some angry woman from FEMA a few weeks later…
“Hello, I want to sue”
“What for?”
“Because no one came to rescue me and my house and the entire contents are now in another zip code”
“Did you not evacuate when the order was given?”
“No”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t hear the door bell ring”
“But we went round the streets in a humvee with a very angry woman yelling into a microphone, telling you all to leave immediately”
“I thought that was my ex wife”
About half the neighbors stayed and half left. Directly opposite us is a lovely old retired couple. I think you call them empty nesters. Lets call them Tim and Betty. I have become great friends with them both, especially the husband as he used to be a handyman in New York before retiring in Colorado, and once when I went over to borrow some sort of tool, his tiny framed wife popped her head into the garage and bellowed in that lovely Jewish accent, that if her husband doesn't have the tool I wanted, then it’s because they haven’t actually made it.
His garage is a temple. Temple DeWalt. He can only fit 2 cars in his 3 car garage, because of all the crap he has.
During one of my heated conversations with my wife during the all the drama, I asked her to go check on the elderly pair. She said that shortly after the evacuation order was given, they were standing there in the driveway arguing like only a couple who have been married 40 years can, about which car to take and which car to leave behind.
“My car's older, let’s take it”
“But my car rides better and besides, your car smells like a swamp”
“We need to get going”
“Maybe I should pack some sandwiches”
“We're only going 20 mins down the road”
“Should we leave a light on?”
“What for, the place is about to become a water filled wasteland”
And on it went apparently for what seemed an eternity. My wife reckons that as she drove off with the car packed to the gunwales they were still going strong.
In the 20-odd years that this couple have lived in Colorado, they have never seen or experienced anything like this. Ever.
Then there's the neighbor diagonally opposite us. Lets call him Dave, because that is in fact, his real name.
Dave is also retired. He too is married but unlike the other couple, no one has actually ever seen his wife. Maybe he buried her in the back yard. I have no idea. Anyway, He constantly complains how much of a pain his wife is and when we are all out of earshot of any one resembling a spouse, we all nod in agreement, and concur that in fact, most wives are difficult and don’t understand us at all.
On the surface, Dave could be considered rather eccentric. My son loves him because he has this wonderful old yellow convertible Corvette which he charges around the neighborhood on sunny days. He refuses to drive it in winter or when it rains. Makes perfect sense.
Anyway he took No 1 Son for a drive and junior was impressed not only with the car but at the fact that Dave waved and whistled to every female they drove past.
“Dad, Dave sure knows a lot of women”
“Does he have more than one wife?”
“No, this isn't Utah”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind”
When I first met Dave, the first thing he said to me is "Hey Aussie, want a beer...?" Not wanting to be rude - I naturally accepted even though I am but a very light drinker.
He then asked if I wanted to see his collection of guns. Beer in hand, I nodded in the affirmative.
It wasn’t so much a collection as a military grade arsenal. Forty weapons and counting. And a reloading room which could cater to the needs of the entire state police force.
“Dave, what exactly are you afraid of?” I said with genuine curiosity
“Absolutely nothing” he replied rather curtly.
Later I learned that Dave is indeed, some sort of competition grade skeet shooter. Maybe its sporting clays. Same same. I forget. But you get the idea. Essentially, he rarely misses at what he aims at.
Colorado, for those of you who don’t know, has this thing called a "Make My Day law". Apparently, if someone breaks into your home and threatens you or your family or your marijuana plants, you are in fact, allowed to riddle them with bullets.
But the subtle difference between lets say Michigan and Colorado is that in Michigan they wouldn’t stop shooting until they ran out of ammo or the Po-Po showed up.
In Colorado, because we are a culturally enlightened state where dope is now quite legal and the love of micro-brewed beer is something of an art form, if you broke into someone like Daves house, I am 110% certain that he would in fact, shoot you in the head (and wouldn’t miss).
But the critical difference is that you because you are in Colorado, the home of the Rocky Mountains, you would be given a joint to smoke to calm your nerves and some sort of exotic IPA to drink, while waiting for the paramedics to arrive.
Or something like this.
I have no idea how we arrived here, but by this stage in our relationship, I think you understand. Sort of.
So, evacution of our little town was in full swing. Some neighbors stayed. And some ran away. Dave, as you might imagine, stayed because as he said to me later "someone has to stay behind and protect the street"
My wife and I argued back and forth for the next hour and by this time, I was absolutely certain that my mothers wine bottle had run dry.
In the end, we decided that if we were going to perish in the 500-year flood, we should do it together, so I convinced the family to escape Camp Uncomfortable and head home.
While I think it a little rude of me to mention the town my wife and kids were evacuated to – it is still worth mentioning. This is a town that we originally looked at living in. It is about 7 miles from where we are now. Terrible place. Full of angry women with short haircuts.
I have no idea what the authorities were thinking when they moved from the perfect safety of the school they were in to this other towns school. Now, I’m no geography student but as far as I could tell (and so could Google Maps), this town was 7 miles closer to the foothills, which was the original source of the water.
Maybe they were high. Or drunk. Or both. It is the only plausible explanation.
We live a few hundred yards from a quaint little park, which has a little creek running through it. The kids often play down there and take the dog. Because the dog lacks intelligence (essentially it is as dumb as a box of rocks), both it and the kids come back looking like they competed in the local mud wrestling tournament.
However this little creek grew a giant set of creek testicles when the rain came down and it was now a raging river. All the playground equipment got swept into the next suburb (literally). There is a row of houses facing the park and much to the horror of the local residents, the water started to lap at the back doors (literally). Then their basements started to drink water like an alcoholic at a Hollywood after party.
I have no idea why, but I knew we would be ok. We live on a slight incline and our house is elevated – so by my reckoning, the water level would need to rise another 30-feet at least before our house would be in danger.
When the family pulled into the drive, there were some very unhappy faces.
The kids for one thought that the shelter was a great place. Free soda. Hot Dogs. And plenty of kids to play with.
My mother on the other hand was hyper ventilating as a result of disobeying the law. She was convinced that she would be deported as soon as the authorities could find her. And my wife was unhappy at having to move yet again, even though she agreed that those people at this special town were a bunch of very special people (translation, a piano had obviously fallen on their heads when they were very young).
But we were all together. Even the dog and the cat. And the gekkos. And now all we had to do was wait. Which is what we did.
I promptly took an Ambien and went to bed. My mother on the other hand peered out the front room window for most of the night, with Dave giving her a wink from the other side of the road, every 15-mins.
It was going to be a long night...
Sep 24, 2013, 5:46 pm
#11
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: cbr
Programs: QF WP (OWE) / LTG (LT OWS) | Hyatt Globalist
Posts: 4,972
I thought you'd fallen off the face of the earth before realizing you now live in Colorado.
Posting this before reading the entire TR - trust things are fine and the family is a-ok.
Posting this before reading the entire TR - trust things are fine and the family is a-ok.
Last edited by SQ421; Sep 24, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Sep 25, 2013, 2:39 pm
#14
Moderator, Trip Reports
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Denver, CO
Programs: UA GS-2MM, Marriott Ambassador
Posts: 3,715
Human nature is a funny animal. Disasters tend to bring out the best and worst in people. After people in our town took a deep breath and worked out what needed to be done, the community rallied. And rallied hard.
Actually, the organization which impressed me the most throughout this whole ordeal was the kids school.
My wife actually chose where we live now based on the quality of these educational facilities. She pored over website after website, read as much as she could and basically left no stone unturned. And this is was even before we arrived, while we were still in Singapore. My mother in law (the large one) said to her that she wished she had taken the same amount of care and run the same amount of due diligence when picking a husband.
Anyway.
This whole “disaster” thing was relatively new to me. Especially up close and personal.
When you live in Singapore, about the only thing which equates to any sort of calamity is when your maid is impregnated by a Malaysian fireman and runs away.
And in Australia, we have some pretty horrific bush fires each summer. But Aussies are relatively left alone by mother nature. There’s no tornado ally. No real floodplains to speak of. No blizzards in winter which shut down an entire coast. We have hot summers and mild winters.
Although, once, there was a truck drivers strike and it threatened the local beer supply, but apparently the Prime Minister at the time declared this a Federal crisis to avert a massive uprising. The Army were called in to help move kegs of beer around but this was soon halted as not a whole lot of beer was making it to its final destination. The entire thing was a bit of a balls up.
Probably because of some rather sad events in Colorado with misguided fools and firearms, the schools appear to have this weapons grade email system. Man, it’s a sight to behold and experience. My inbox started to burst at the seams moments after the floods occurred. I have no idea how I got on this list, but when the heavens opened up and tried to drown our community, there appeared out of no-where a small band of very committed school Moms. Probably the most potent force on the planet.
I will tell you why.
Remember I said at the start of this, that events like this bring out the best and worst in people. Well listen to this.
Our school had a lot of families affected. To the point that they couldn’t live in their houses. One particular family had none of their own family in our town. Zip. Nada. So they had to rent a house or apartment in the neighboring town while their place was repaired. Incidentally the same silly town people were evacuated to. The second time.
They called a local realtor who found them a place for 3-months. Then the same realtor said that she had to charge the equivalent of another months rent to cover her finders fee.
The family concerned was in no mood to argue and reluctantly accepted the terms. But when this band of determined school Moms discovered this outrageous behavior, well, they went supernova and declared a full blown Midwest Jihad against the greedy land merchant. Cellphones melted in the process.
I think at one point, they sat around in their underwear, chanting, holding hands and mentally forcing their bodies to synchronize their “cycles” so they could muster an even great level of anger against one of their own. These women unleashed the full force of pending menopause against this poor, hapless real estate vendor.
Some of their husbands left town in fear, their kids stayed at the local shelters and the family dog and cat surrendered themselves to the RSPCA…
It was a sight to behold. They called and belittled the agent at all hours of the day and night. Chased her in their minivans. Threatened to sleep with her husband and say they enjoyed it. Actually maybe not. But you get the idea. They were pissed. And they were a force to be reckoned with. In the end, the silly woman gave in and waived the fee (it helped when one of the school Mom’s cancelled a $2M listing in the neighborhood).
So when I received an email from one of the Jihad Leaders to help one particular family, I probably made one of the wisest decisions in my life and simply said yes. The fact that my own wife, who can be a force to be reckoned with when the devil invades her body, said that it would be well into the new year before I would see her naked again if I didn’t take a week off and do some real work for a change.
Which I did.
And it just so happened to be probably the best week I have had in a very long time.
Actually, the organization which impressed me the most throughout this whole ordeal was the kids school.
My wife actually chose where we live now based on the quality of these educational facilities. She pored over website after website, read as much as she could and basically left no stone unturned. And this is was even before we arrived, while we were still in Singapore. My mother in law (the large one) said to her that she wished she had taken the same amount of care and run the same amount of due diligence when picking a husband.
Anyway.
This whole “disaster” thing was relatively new to me. Especially up close and personal.
When you live in Singapore, about the only thing which equates to any sort of calamity is when your maid is impregnated by a Malaysian fireman and runs away.
And in Australia, we have some pretty horrific bush fires each summer. But Aussies are relatively left alone by mother nature. There’s no tornado ally. No real floodplains to speak of. No blizzards in winter which shut down an entire coast. We have hot summers and mild winters.
Although, once, there was a truck drivers strike and it threatened the local beer supply, but apparently the Prime Minister at the time declared this a Federal crisis to avert a massive uprising. The Army were called in to help move kegs of beer around but this was soon halted as not a whole lot of beer was making it to its final destination. The entire thing was a bit of a balls up.
Probably because of some rather sad events in Colorado with misguided fools and firearms, the schools appear to have this weapons grade email system. Man, it’s a sight to behold and experience. My inbox started to burst at the seams moments after the floods occurred. I have no idea how I got on this list, but when the heavens opened up and tried to drown our community, there appeared out of no-where a small band of very committed school Moms. Probably the most potent force on the planet.
I will tell you why.
Remember I said at the start of this, that events like this bring out the best and worst in people. Well listen to this.
Our school had a lot of families affected. To the point that they couldn’t live in their houses. One particular family had none of their own family in our town. Zip. Nada. So they had to rent a house or apartment in the neighboring town while their place was repaired. Incidentally the same silly town people were evacuated to. The second time.
They called a local realtor who found them a place for 3-months. Then the same realtor said that she had to charge the equivalent of another months rent to cover her finders fee.
The family concerned was in no mood to argue and reluctantly accepted the terms. But when this band of determined school Moms discovered this outrageous behavior, well, they went supernova and declared a full blown Midwest Jihad against the greedy land merchant. Cellphones melted in the process.
I think at one point, they sat around in their underwear, chanting, holding hands and mentally forcing their bodies to synchronize their “cycles” so they could muster an even great level of anger against one of their own. These women unleashed the full force of pending menopause against this poor, hapless real estate vendor.
Some of their husbands left town in fear, their kids stayed at the local shelters and the family dog and cat surrendered themselves to the RSPCA…
It was a sight to behold. They called and belittled the agent at all hours of the day and night. Chased her in their minivans. Threatened to sleep with her husband and say they enjoyed it. Actually maybe not. But you get the idea. They were pissed. And they were a force to be reckoned with. In the end, the silly woman gave in and waived the fee (it helped when one of the school Mom’s cancelled a $2M listing in the neighborhood).
So when I received an email from one of the Jihad Leaders to help one particular family, I probably made one of the wisest decisions in my life and simply said yes. The fact that my own wife, who can be a force to be reckoned with when the devil invades her body, said that it would be well into the new year before I would see her naked again if I didn’t take a week off and do some real work for a change.
Which I did.
And it just so happened to be probably the best week I have had in a very long time.
Sep 25, 2013, 3:32 pm
#15
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Europe & Indonesia
Programs: BAEC Gold, LH SEN, EK ex-Gold, IHG Plat
Posts: 11,571
Erm, brilliant. ^
Had the family from Texas visit me in June and we drove through to the areas affected by the 100-year flood in Germany. Trouble is that the last 100-year-flood happened in this century as well.
Had the family from Texas visit me in June and we drove through to the areas affected by the 100-year flood in Germany. Trouble is that the last 100-year-flood happened in this century as well.