california's burning, burning

gotta go shoot augustana for writing that song.... it's been stuck in my head all day. know why? BECAUSE CALIFORNIA IS FREAKING BURNING!!!

yeah so we had to evacuate at 5 am this morning. 8 different fires burning pretty much all of southern california and down into mexico. got up and grabbed what we could.. got my laptop and guitar and some clothes. packed it up in all the cars and drove out into the traffic of everyone else leaving.

leaving this morning was like the worst scene in an action movie.. the sky was all black and smokey, ash was raining from the sky, and a line of traffic stuck going up the hill in front of the house while we're all packing up the cars and trying not to choke.

then it was stressful because we got split up.. dad and megan were at the church office and dad wouldn't leave. and mom and the rest of us (me driving my car and her in the van) drove around forever. we ended up leaving my car in a parking lot... i hope it's okay ><

so we figured we'd head north up to a friend's house.. but the 15 north was closed. so we had to take a very very very round about way... with the rest of san diego.

red is the route we took.

blue is the way we would normally go.


basically we drove around for nearly 10 hours... it was almost all bumper to bumper traffic everywhere. EVERYONE had to evacuate. we went even farther south for a while because it was the only way we could go.. and there was more to it than this. so yeah..

now we're finally up here and have been here about 3 or 4 hours.. and now they're saying that this area might have to evacuate too sometime tonight. ugh. and if we don't leave then it's still 10 of us in a house with 2 beds, 2 couches and some chairs... not fun.

luckily they're saying most of the fires by my house have died down.. but the power, water, and gas are all turned off.. they said we can't go back for a day or two. oy.