The Disaster Diary

This is not the article I promised to write on camping. Lea and I were going camping, but then the South got smacked by Hurricane Delta. Experienced hurricane trackers that we are, we checked the weather daily to see if Delta would veer further north or west and maybe, maybe, maybe wouldn’t rain on us too hard… But such was not to be. Our campsite in west-central Georgia was destined to get hosed by endless rain bands straight from the Gulf of Mexico. We called the park and delayed our reservation.

This was disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. After all, Lea and I are travel disaster magnets.

On our very first trip together, Lea and I went camping at Fort Pickens National Seashore at Pensacola Beach on Labor Day weekend, 2000. That year had seen a typically hot summer, but we reasoned that by Labor Day it would have cooled enough to make camping tolerable.

Hah! Had we stayed home in Baton Rouge, we would have enjoyed a record high of 104°F according to Weather Underground’s historical data archive. On Pensacola Beach, the high was “merely” 94°F, with a nighttime low of burning up in a tiny tent without even a breeze to offer relief. At least the water was cool, but that summer had also seen a spike in shark attacks along the Gulf, so we weren’t too comfortable getting in.

A few years later, we again decided to camp in the Florida Panhandle, this time at Thanksgiving, 2003. Normally, late autumn in Florida is comparable to a cool summer in the northern states, but this year Florida rewarded us with nightly lows of 49°F, 41°F, and 32°F. Had we remained one more day, we would have woken to a balmy 26°F.

The second year we were together, Lea and I went to Tickfaw State Park, less than an hour’s drive from our house in Baton Rouge. We’d invested in a brand new waterproof tent that was larger and more accommodating for the two of us (well, for me) than the 6’x6’ tent we’d taken to Pensacola. That first night at Tickfaw, a whole bayou’s worth of water fell out of the sky and we discovered exactly how waterproof our tent wasn’t. The next morning we gave up on staying any longer, packed the whole mess into our car, and went home.

In 2005 we camped in Milton, Florida, to go canoeing on the Blackwater River. It rained that first night, but not enough to deter us – we were well-practiced now at keeping the elements at bay. The rain did, however, raise the level and the speed of the Blackwater so that our canoe trip the next morning was, shall we say, exciting. I remember having trouble simply getting our canoe in the water and pointing it downstream. At a bend in the river, we paddled right into a log that barely broke the surface, sending Lea and me flying into the drink. Somehow our gear remained in the canoe. At noon we pulled ourselves onto a bank to eat lunch and dry off, while a whole church group of teenagers calmly paddled past us in pressed khakis and unwrinkled shirts.

In April 2006, we planned to spend a weekend at Dismal’s Canyon, a private campground in northwest Alabama that’s one of the few places in the world where glowworms can be found. Bad weather and tornadoes were forecast, so at the last minute we changed our reservation to Red Top Mountain State Park in Georgia to get out of the storm’s path. What happened? The worst of the storm skipped Dismal’s Canyon entirely and came straight at us. We woke after midnight to the sound of hail on our tent, ran to the car, and sheltered at the nearest Waffle House until the front went through.

The mother of all bad weather events to coincide with us trying to camp was undoubtedly the May 2010 “thousand year flood” of Tennessee’s Cumberland River. We’d met with some friends at Cedars of Lebanon State Park and planned to take a nature tour on Saturday, May 1. The rain was steady all morning, making us hunt down a covered pavilion to cook breakfast and reducing the nature tour to an indoor lecture. That afternoon we retreated to our tent to wait out the rain – until the water surrounding our campsite started to steadily rise. We didn’t even bother to fold our tent up – we just rolled it into the trunk of our car and high-tailed to our friend Melissa’s house (south of Nashville) through a zero-visibility downpour. Even when we got there, I was somewhat dismayed by the water approaching Melissa’s back patio, and even more so when watching a building float down the Cumberland on live TV.

Does correlation imply causation? Do Lea and I have especially bad travel karma? Do we actually cause these things to happen by deciding to travel somewhere? The data isn’t limited to camping trips.

We spent a week in Negril in May 2006 for a friend’s wedding. May is the start of the rainy season, but even so we weren’t expecting the monsoon that trapped us in our hotel room for three solid days while we watched the area outside our window turn into a decent-sized pond. Our trip to the Yucatan in April 2007 was greeted with unseasonable wind and cold – which didn’t stop the snorkeling companies from trying to convince us to go swimming in that year’s extremely cold and choppy coastal waters (we didn’t). In October 2013 (admittedly, again in the rainy season) our cruise stop in St. Lucia was met with a downpour excessive even for that time of year. We took an excursion to see a waterfall, but ended up standing in one.

In July 2012, we spent three weeks in East Africa, with a layover both ways in Rome. In Rome we enjoyed a heatwave with highs in excess of 100°F, and the discovery that many buildings in Rome don’t have air conditioning. (Neither were the subways, which were packed with disgruntled futbol hooligans unhappy that Italy had lost to Spain 4-0 in the 2012 Euro championship.)

We landed in Dar Es Salaam to find out there was a doctors’ strike underway. There were riots in Zanzibar before we arrived, and shortly after we left, one of the ferries to the island sank with over 800 people on board. Bombings in Mombasa kept Lea’s sister Lisa from traveling with us into Kenya, and security at our hotel there was extra-tight. We had to pass through metal detectors just to get in the door, and armed guards wouldn’t even let taxis approach unless they’d been specifically called by the concierge. (Now, that’s service!)

During our South American Odyssey, a part of Argentina we traveled through was getting over a surge of Hantavirus cases. A Yellow Fever outbreak was just getting underway in the Brazilian state of Bahia as we arrived in its capital, Salvador. To be clear, we were vaccinated against Yellow Fever, but there is no cure, vaccine, or treatment for Hantavirus, according to the CDC. It was hard enough keeping the bus schedules straight, much less the potential contagion vectors.

Don’t get me started on volcanos. Whatever the “average proximal volcanic eruption rate per traveling couple” is, Lea and I exceed it. A volcanic eruption in the Galapagos delayed our flight to Ecuador, and the leftover fumes prevented us from exploring the tunnels on Isabela Island. Earlier that year, another eruption shut down Guatemala City’s airport shortly after our stay there. Two days after we bought tickets to Iceland – two days, I tell you – the Bárðarbunga stratovolcano erupted under the Vatnajökull ice sheet. Though that ended up becoming the highlight of our trip, but when I first read the news about the eruption, I called Lea from work and said, “Seriously? Seriously?”

Whether or not you believe that Lea and I have a “natural disaster fairy” who follows us around, I’ll give you the same advice we give everyone – Before planning a trip somewhere, email us first and make sure we’re not going.

P.S. Things are afoot on my fiction writing blog: Check it out!