Goodnight, IRENE

The Kitty and the Oracle took a trip to Florida for two weeks. There was lots to do and we had a very successful trip. Of course Florida is known as the land of the Hurricanes, and not just the University of Miami football team. To our great surprise, the latest hurricane, Irene, missed us completely and headed up the east coast to New England. On TV, it was the only thing on almost every channel. There was good coverage but there was also the usual Jim Cantore and his clones standing out in the wind and rain in a slicker with a microphone being buffeted for no apparent reason by the weather. While they excitedly talked about devastation and tidal surges, there were always some surfers going into the water in the background or some old lady in a wheelchair rolling by. The preparedness was necessary, the news coverage was vintage "Chicken Little."

Our return trip to Nantucket was delayed a couple of days. We set our alarm for 4 am and drove to Tampa. We turned in our Chevy Malibu to HERTZ, and boarded JetBlue to Boston. From there we expected to go on another jet to Nantucket but to our surprise we were reticketed to Cape Air, known affectionately in these parts as Cape FEAR because they fly small planes that are buffeted around like Jim Cantore on a boardwalk. I said to myself "Oh man, this sucks." We had to carry the heavy roll aboards down a long flight of stairs and then limbo into what looked like Malibu Barbie's plane. Dave, our pilot sat at the controls with no copilot. There were 5 passengers including us. It took off like any small Cessna does and flew south. It was such a nice day and the visibility was amazing. We saw the Cape, all the islands and individual homes and our favorite places when we flew over Nantucket. It was a special treat and way better than the AirBus would have been. If the weather were bad, I would have said the exact opposite, I suppose. They had those little bags in the seatbacks for a reason. We are back in island and the weather is awesome...75 in the day 65 at night. A big improvement over Sarasota where it was 95 and sunny in the day, and 95 and dark at night.