Hurricane Ivan - Part 2

Thursday morning we checked the internet again and Ivan was getting closer. He still wasn’t all that great of a concern to us. Just something to prepare for, “just in case”. We took a drive over to Mateo’s carpentry shop and verified that he had gotten our plywood for the windows. He told us that he was surprised and shocked when he got to the store because there was very little plywood left to choose from. He said that the hotel zone in Cancun had bought most of it. He thought everybody was being alarmists. He promised to stop by the next day with our plywood.

True to his word, Mateo stopped by on Friday morning with our wood. He dutifully measured and cut it all to fit our windows. I was aghast to discover that he had not purchased enough to cover all of our windows! We had measured carefully and given him the exact measurements. Being a professional carpenter, we figure he would be able to figure out how many pieces of plywood to buy. We opted not to cover the south facing windows. If the hurricane came, it would be from the north and east. We would probably get water blown in, but we could deal with that. With that major project done, we stored the wood and screws to attach it with in our bodega and were feeling quite smug that we had taken steps to protect our house.

We had plenty of food for the two of us, had purchased four 20 liter bottles of purified water and had even gotten one of those portable sterno stoves so that we could boil water for coffee! Feeling quite prepared, we didn’t give Ivan much more thought. Life continued as normal. We were in the middle of remodeling our house and that continued on schedule and we just went about our daily routine. Of course, we checked the internet every so often but didn’t really expect to see Ivan heading too close to us.