Tropical Storm Chantal

Well, we survived our first Dominican tropical storm of the season. Chantal came through yesterday, and after much hype, ended up being a rather boring storm. But don't get me wrong, I much prefer boring when it comes to storms.

Chantal rolled in Tuesday morning where we were prepped for 60 mph winds and 4-6" of rain. Back home, this may not seem like much, but keep in mind the infrastructure in Dominica. We are especially prone to flooding, landslides, rock falls, etc. To make things more interesting, we got quite a rain storm Monday morning, so there was already some serious flooding.

Ross actually closed campus on Tuesday. That made me think that maybe this storm was going to be a good one. This Indiana girl gets a little edgy during hurricane season. The only one I've experienced before is hurricane Sandy in Freeport. I conveniently skipped out on Isaac that season as well as I was back home when he hit.

Seeing this come on the radar was a little intimidating. Nothing like a huge storm to remind you how tiny of an island we are living on.

But alas, Chantal just brought in some pretty good wind and some rain. Nothing too terrible. The center of the storm passed about 60 miles south of the southern tip of Dominica, and since we are in the north west (not to be confused with Kim and Kanye's baby) corner, we had some good separation between us and the storm. Also, we are on the other side of the mountain, so the storm clouds lighten up a bit once they break over the peaks. The majority of the time anyway.

There were times where it was raining and blowing so hard, we couldn't see too far off in the distance. At times when we could see the ocean, we could see how rough the waters were.

Yea, you can't really tell in the photo. It was worth a try.

We never lost power, which I had been banking on the using generator to charge all of our electronics since that doesn't go toward our electric usage, but I was glad we didn't end up losing it. We did lose internet, though. Apparently our internet provider had a damaged fiber or something, so we were out for the majority of the day. Nothing too terrible, especially since we were anticipating that, we could plan accordingly.

Matt used his hurricane day to study, and I worked. We broke out a puzzle just before dinner and had a fun time working on that. Guess who's half is much more complete than the other's?

By evening, Chantal had passed and we got the all clear. There wasn't so much as a slight breeze in the air. We had our standard Tuesday family dinner, which was good as we were ready to get out a bit.

All in all, Chantal was a bit boring, but I'd be fine if the rest of hurricane season went just like that.