a night to remember

Don't worry, we haven't had any flooding in about 3 weeks. But about 3 weeks ago we had our worst flood yet.
It all started with a great idea to go to the Shangri-La Hotel and eat dinner. They have a wonderful buffet that we had been wanting to try. The plan was to get all dressed up and meet two other couples for dinner at 7. Early on this plan went bad.
Around 5 it started to rain, well even before that we saw the rain clouds. Not just the typical gray clouds, but big, black, angry clouds. The heavens opened and the rains came down. After only 20 or 30 minutes the back of our house was beginning to flood and the street was underwater. We persevered. All dressed up, we packed our good shoes in a backpack and headed out the door wearing Chaco's (the only shoe suitable for walking in flood waters). We safely made it to our friends house and got in the car with them. About half way there we were driving on roads that were under about 3 - 4 feet of water. The car was practically floating by all the people out swimming in the streets.
At last we made it to the restaurant. We spent several lovely, dry hours there eating and eating and eating. It was wonderful!
Then we went home. On the way home we got several messages from friends saying that our neighborhood was flooded (that's not unusual), they kept telling us it was worse than usual and that they didn't think we could make it home. We scoffed. Of course we can make it home, we have an SUV, it's not like the water on our street was going to be 5 feet deep....
Well, it was. We made it about half way down our street before we realized the water was too high to open the car doors. So, we headed over to our friends house to sleep. I felt like a refugee, we had to displace two innocent little girls so that we would have a bed for the night.

That's right, we took over the Princess Room for the night. I was so happy to be there for Roger's first time to sleep on Princess sheets.
The next morning we headed over to our house to find a little water still on the street. Then we went inside. Wow! What a stinky mess we found. Luckily all the water had gone out of the house, the cats were still alive and our helper was coming an hour later to clean the whole thing up. I made a video of the post-flood damage. From what we could tell the water came in from the back (like normal) and from the front (definitely not normal). It was about a foot high throughout most of the downstairs and closer to three feet high in the back of our house. Enjoy the video!