I myself experienced my first hurricane as a kid in New Jersey, while staying in a cottage beach house on the Jersey shore in 1978...one that brushed the coastline, forced our evacuation to a hotel inland, caused flooding and minor storm surge, and left fish swimming around in our cottage kitchen!
I was also caught in Erin in 1995 while staying at a friend's house in Vero Beach...it was too late to try to break for home, since I wasn't sure if the storm would veer south and catch me on the road, or even head south and hit my hometown 3 hours to the south (it didn't...the eye came right over Vero).
And my mother and father have a wild story from last year, when they were on a transatlantic cruise from Ireland to New York on the Holland America Rotterdam. After calling me from Ireland to ask if their home was OK from hurricane Frances, which had just hit us 2 weeks earlier, and casually joking about how lucky they were to have been on a cruise when the hurricane struck, they sailed across the North Atlantic. Somewhere in the middle, Hurricane Karl caught up with them...the captain thought he could stay on the fringe of the storm leaving it to cross in his wake, but the 45-55 foot seas battered the ship and fuel-starved the engines...which promptly died. The 60,000 ton ship bobbed powerless for 6 hours in 50-foot-plus seas as the Cat 1 Karl passed over them, getting hit broadside from waves, incapable of steering bow-in. Finally, engine power was restored, and the battered ship and passengers crawled back to New York...many passengers bruised and scared. Some shots from onboard:
And if that wasn't enough of an insult...their flight home to Florida from New York was canceled, because Hurricane Jeanne was in the process of passing through South Florida!
So...who else has a travel or vacation experience which was somehow impacted by a tropical storm or hurricane?
