How did it go, Silverspoon? We just had a lot of rain, not much in the wind department. You were much closer to the action. Any excitement to report?.
Oh yeah, but we made it through. Thanks for asking. Arthur was pretty much spent before he got to you.
On the guest front: Had a GF, 5* NYC restauranteur and wife with a 3-night reservation delay their reservation to arrive on the second day at 4 pm, then delay their reservation to arrive at 8 pm....delay their reservation to arrive at 11pm...then 1am, until finally we told them to turn around and not to come. I had jumped through 5 hoops preparing the GF menu for these people so I was not too happy about turning them away. We didn't take any $$ from them but they think they are going to do us a favor by rescheduling for later in the summer. That is NOT going to happen.
DH hates to charge for nights not used and I insist on it so this type of guest presents all kinds of headaches for us, personally. When they finally e-mailed that they were on their way and would arrive at 1 am on the second night of their reservation in the middle of the storm driving up through CT, we cancelled them. Good thing. We lost power at 11:30 pm with the main house full and were without power and water until 3:30pm yesterday. The transformer outside the house blew in quite a show of fireworks. The feds, as well as local police, showed up with blue lights all over the place. Needless to say, the wind was howling and there was plenty of water. Sigh...so much for a good nights sleep.
We lost one tree, and the yard was a mess with small limbs, but that is pretty much par for the course for us. No damage to the house or guest's cars. Yesterday was a clean-up day, putting hanging plants back, setting up outside furniture, chain sawing the tree and raking etc. The place is almost put back together.
Breakfast without power went well since I had planned for it and had all of the food stored in a separate refrigerator and basically ready to be cooked/heated on our gas cook top: Banana split (you know the banana, yogurt, jam, granola thingy we all talked about last year), turkey bacon (for our no pork guests), sausages, and crepes (pre-made) stuffed with sweetened homemade fromage blanc, mascarpone and orange zest, topped with fruit compote and plenty of strong hot coffee. I was relieved that the GF foodies we cancelled were not sitting at the table.
The guests enjoyed breakfast (what an adventure, right?), headed out for the beach for the day (a beautiful day!) and the power was back on by the time they returned at 4 pm.
Soooooo, all in all...not to bad. But I sure do hope that this early storm was a fluke. Hurricanes in Sept. are the norm here...not in JULY!