we have so many here, its hard to pick one... honestly, hurricanes are a time when my family is very close, and we share alot.. so many memories, both bad and good...my mom lives next door and my brother, behind her. We spend alot of quality time together, even if it is quite stressful.
during Andrew, we lived in a mobile home, had a toddler AND a home under construction. It was the most stressful one in my adult life, worrying about my new half built home...
during Gustav, I was lucky enough to spend alot of time with my nephew(28) who I rarely see, that was a nice thing... we were lucky not to have too much damage here.

OH!!!! THE MOST MEMORABLE EVENT EVER!

During Gustav, last week, I had a visitor in my BEDROOM! A giant skink(lizard) got in my bedroom through the open window... you would never beleive that 4 grownups would be running around a room squeeling and jumping, with flashlights, trying to catch the poor thing! He was about 2 inches around and 9 or 10 inches long, ewwwww....

My tootie tried to get him but DH wouldnt let him, we didnt know if he could hurt him!

We never laughed so hard as we did this day... me, my daughter, her BF and DH were surely given a run for our money... LOL

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.:rolleyes: 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!

I have a few odd memories - getting to sleep with 2 chairs pushed together when I was little as Hazel passed thru PA; having Diana's eye pass over us when we lived in NC; Agnes destroying this whole area in PA - we lived along the Susquehanna and had to chain the car to a tree and high-tail it up the mountain - the flooding was incredible; having to evacuate right in the middle of Floyd(we lived a couple blocks from the beach) to head to VA for our son's wedding only to have Floyd follow us up there where we had to evacuate his place when it hit them the day before the wedding. We took our cat who was terrified of noise and to be outside. He had to spend the hurricane in our truck since our son had 2 GS dogs that would have eaten him. We took turns all nite long going out in the storm and sitting with him in the truck, poor kitty. He was fine when it was all over and the day after the storm, the wedding was perfect - it was on the beach at the Norfolk Naval Base. That's it for me - aside from losing alot of things during Agnes, we have been very lucky. I am praying for all those families in the path of Ike, right now. That is a very scary storm. God Bless and watch over you all.