Did Hurricane Irma Strike St. Simons Island, Georgia?
How did your ex mother in law get to Fort Myers, Florida? Is she retired? You say you don’t know why they didn’t leave. I would have been out of there as soon as the storm was even mentioned or forecast.
Believe it or not we drove through Fort Myers once on the way back and forth to Sanibel/Captiva which are barrier islands right off shore from Fort Myers. Captiva Island in particular was so small that any storm surge at all would immediately make it disappear. You could see from shore to shore and easily walk the distance on that island. At the narrowest point the island was only 100 feet wide or so. All the buildings there were built up on piles so the storm surge would go underneath them. I remember being in a grocery store like that where your bags were lowered down on a dumb waiter to the parking lot level and put in your car.
My own grandmother, Doris Benner, the one I used as a model for Dora Benley, owned a condo in Sarasota, Florida, but that was high rise. My great-grandmother, the model for Etta May for in fact her name was Etta May, had a house in Sarasota.
Have you heard what happened to your ex mother-in-law? This morning all I hear is that Jacksonville, Florida on the Atlantic Coast was flooded with a storm surge bigger than any since Hurricane Dora in 1964. I also visited Jacksonville. We stayed at the Ponte Vedra Resort outside town on the beach. Jacksonsville looked like an old industrial city somehow in the South. It is near St. Augustine where the Spanish settled hundreds of years ago.
It is also very close by to St Simons Island, Georgia, the setting for Dark 1 and Dark 2 of my Dark Series, the one that was originally published by Scholastic UK. It is soon to be republished by Cheops Books, LLC.
