Goodnight Irene

Easing out of what was a great week of vacation, capped by a very intense couple of days of travel and hurricane-fatigue.

We had a wedding to attend in Connecticut yesterday. And although it was a four hour drive (plus a ferry ride from Martha's Vineyard) to get there, we made the somewhat questionable decision to leave the reception early enough to get back in the car and bolt to New York before the really heavy stuff hit. That's right, we figured our best bet was to drive into Hurricane Irene, on the logic that we wouldn't be able to get through if we waited until today, and, well, we really wanted to get home.

In retrospect, it was the right call. The drive was hairy (lots of rain, roads already flooding, defogger overworked) although I have to say the traffic was lighter than I've ever seen on those roads. As in, scary empty on I684, the Hutch, the Saw Mill and the Hudson. As in, one of those spooky apocalypse movies "empty-but-for-other-crazy-people" empty.

Hoboken was closed off altogether - evacuated, cars off the streets (including the parking spaces), so that wasn't even an option. As it happened, we made it to Chelsea in a couple of medium-tense hours, got a parking spot for Lola on reliably high ground, unloaded and unpacked (including the four gallons of spring water we brought home from Massachusetts), filled the tub with water, made sure the flashlights were handy, and absorbed from TV and the internets all the reasons why we probably should have stayed away. We had considered staying with friends in New Paltz and just sticking it out until Monday - it's doubly good we didn't do that, since New Paltz actually seems to have been hit with at least as much flooding as New York.

Woke up to see the rain mostly gone but the wind still in full vigor. Laid low for a while, then went to Kelly's for a bad weather movie party. Exhausted now, and not sure if the trains will be back up tomorrow. Watching the VMAs for some reason and about to fall asleep. Kevin R. Free gets some points for pointing out via Twitter that pop culture itself jumped the shark. Take a moment to mull that with me.

And while I love what Anthony King tweeted about the storm ("If Steve Jobs was still CEO, iRene would have been HUGE.") if we're going to be disappointed that this storm wasn't more disastrous than it actually was, that's the kind of disappointment I can live with pretty easily.

Goodnight everybody.