I've only lived in Florida since 03. My wake up call to hurricanes was Hurricane Charley in August 04.....all 150 mph of it. We had just moved in our new house in February and had put up the storm shutters for the umpteenth time that year.
I remember watching everyone on my street putting up their shutters at the last second and it raining like crazy. We live about 15 miles from Port Charlotte where the eye passed. Me, my sig other, his brother, and 2 cats were all packed in one of the bedroom closets. I remember hearing banging in the ceiling and I ran out of the closet into the livingroom. I thought the roof was coming off. It didn't but we moved to the other side of the house into the guest bathroom. Later I found out that the banging I heard was the 2 access panels in the ceiling. I guess the pressure from the wind had caused them to lift and move. I have never in my life heard wind like that. It was so loud it sounded like a train. We had to yell to talk. We were without electricity and water for 5 days. We had friends over and everyone brought their meat and we cooked everything on the grill. Thank God I had filled every sink and tub with water because we used that to kind of wash up and to flush our commodes. We are on a well and since we had no electricity - we had no water. We had to pour water into the commode to use it. It was almost impossible to find ice. Gas was rare and if you found a station that had gas, people were fighting while waiting in line for gas! Only one of us had a cell phone that worked the first few days after the storm. It was crazy!
We had another hurricane that year....can't remember the name but it stressed me out so bad I was sick the whole time.
I never went to sleep that night and just laid in bed listening to the radio. The storm came through about 4 or 5 a.m. and lasted until about noon.
We've had plenty of hurricanes since then but nothing compares to Charley. I will never forget that. Weeks afterwards we drove out to Sanibel Island and it looked like someone had stripped all the trees of their leaves and cut off the tops of all the trees. When you drove the island it used to be really lush and there was a canopy of foliage covering the road. After Charley, it looked like something out of a war movie.....all the trees were completely bald!