We were booked and Good to Go to the Golden Isles. The motorcoach was to depart last
Friday on September 15. Then Hurricane Irma cast her ugly eye on the coasts of
Georgia and Florida, where we were headed. We all watched in horror as the
storm changed paths, conditions sometimes improved and sometimes worsened. It
didn’t make sense to cancel the tour until we knew exactly the situation. We
too, rode out the storm albeit from the safety of Oklahoma.
Two days before departure, we had enough
solid information to know we had to, sadly, cancel the trip. The local
authorities weren’t even allowing the local residents back to their homes.
There was no reason for us to add to the confusion, plus the tour we planned
won’t happen for a while as they recover.
The good news is we work with other
professionals who care about our business. As mentioned, it’s so much more than
travelers; it is motorcoaches, hotels, restaurants, attractions, guides, plus a
few dozen more parts that get “monkey wrenched” when weather and natural
disasters occur. We encourage travelers to protect their fun funds with travel
insurance which covers cancellations and interruptions. But in the bigger
picture (and you can ask your insurance person if I’m right), the insurance
would rather not pay. They would rather the trip go on as planned. In my
conversations with Gulf Coast folks that are just crawling out to see if they
still have a business to provide a service, it seems that to regroup our trip
is one tiny way that we can help those folks.
We aren’t blaming anyone, we are saying,
hey, we still want to come your way and support tourism. We aren’t exactly sure
when that may happen now, but we plan to make it there. Maybe it’s a small
thing, but we it’s worth thinking about. Living in an area that counts on
tourism, we understand what a rainy weekend or blue-green algae will do to our
economy.
We’ve watched the gasoline prices
fluctuate as a result of the storms. There will be many things connected to the
damage whether it’s the cost of orange juice or a small company that you’ve
used for Christmas cards that you learn is no longer in Texas. The effects are
far reaching.
Did you know a hurricane closed down an
Oklahoma cheese factory? It was categorized as Tropical Storm Erin, but it brought
80-mile-an-hour winds and 9 to 11 inches of rain to Watonga. It tore off the
Watonga Cheese Factory’s roof and twisted the building’s foundation and
cinderblock walls. The insurance company condemned the building, along with its
inventory of 7,000 pounds of cheese. Yes, you can still buy Watonga Cheese and
they still have a cheese festival, but the owners were given the incentive to
rebuild and move the plant. Watonga Cheese is made in Perryton, Texas.
Our discomfort was so minor compared to
so many, but there was a storm to ride out, and we did.
