Emma and Ewan's World

Emma was forced out of her typical routine today. San Diego is on fire. Not parts of San Diego, this is the Great London Fire (Or Chicago Fire or San Fran Fire) kind of fire. Again. Rancho Bernardo has had homes burning less than two miles from where my parents live right now and the fire closed to within 2 miles of our home before moving on. We knew that fires had started out in Ramona, (about 30 miles east of San Diego) when we went to bed last night around 10:30. At 2am, both Suzane and I woke up out of a not so sound sleep and decided we better check the news to see what was going on. Instead of two fires burning huge sections of the back country, we were informed of 6 fires all over the county.

And the annual Santa Ana winds were not relenting, so the fire was being fed by 40-70mph winds. We called a friend that lives about 6 miles west of us and asked if we could evacuate to their house, they agreed, and we loaded up the car with all the essentials... You know, Emma stuff and the hard drives that hold all our pictures. And a pair of clothes each. After a couple of hours watching the sun turn unbelievably red and dim, we decided that maybe we should move south where the air is cleaner. We headed down to the boat and found it quite pleasant. Almost like the entire county wasn't burning. Andra offered to give us a place to stay for the night in completely unaffected Mission Valley, and as interesting as cramming the three of us into a berth on the boat sounded, exhaustion was kicking in and we decided that it would be better to partake of Andra's Tempur-Pedic bed instead. My sister rocks!!! My parents yacht club fed us a free meal as we were bedraggled refugees, then we headed over to my sister's place and gave a very exhausted, yet very brave young lady her bath and let her fall asleep in her play-pen.

As of now, over 600 homes have burned. And in less than 36 hours, more than 100,000 acres have burned. It is a miracle that only one person has died at this point. Signing off safe and sound for now.

Here's a picture I took of the sky around 11am this morning.