October 15, 2006: 7:07 am - Oahu, Hawaii - We were sleeping soundly, for once, the cough medicine had done its work and put the whole family into a deep sleep. Even Dori seemed to be enjoying her beauty sleep. Unfortunately our plan of sleeping in was not to be accomplished that day, not because Braedyn woke up crying or because Dori needed to go out to pee, no it was because Talisha woke up saying, "Is someone shaking the house"? The shaking soon stopped and we fell back to sleep, only to have the power go out a few minutes later. No more precious air conditioner! So we got up to investigate, in case this was another fiasco in the making with the cottage we were staying in. We really wanted to avoid being in the house if it caught on fire! Michael took a short walk down to the beach to see if the power outage had impacted anyone else, and it certainly had. It seemed like everyone else was without power. So we decided to make the best of it, and Talisha went for a drive to go pick us up some breakfast from Ted's Bakery just up the road (cheap, good breakfast sandwiches and donuts!). Well, she got there to find out that Ted's had no power and was not serving food. She flipped on the car radio to see if she could find out anything and sure enough, there had been an earthquake. The quake was a 6.6 and was centered on the big island of Hawaii (relatively far from Oahu). The power was out across the entire state and not likely to be coming on anytime soon.
So we made the most of the situation and decided to have grilled steak for breakfast with the steak we had planned to have for dinner that night. Then we pretty much just hung out for a while and listened to the radio to see what was happening. Not a whole lot of news, just a lot of people's throries of what was happening and when things would be back to normal. Since we had no food, nor any way to cook anything we decided to drive up to the Turtle Bay resort (which is nearby) since we had heard that they had a generator and had at least one of their restaurants open. We had an particularly disappointing lunch on the cold, not well cooked buffet line that ended up costing us an arm and a leg (probably won't go back there again). But at least they threw in the cup of coffee for free! We then spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the beach with the kiddo and the dog and just relaxing like we have been anyhow.
That evening we decided we needed to get some more food and we were also in desperate need of some diapers. The local stores were closed, but we had heard that there was power in Mililani town which is not too far from where we are staying. So we headed up the hill where we found a wal-mart that was open. We went in even against my strong moral objections to the place and got a few supplies (diapers, flashlight, and cheetos!) and then headed out to find some food at a fast food joint. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else on Oahu was in line at the only open Burger King so we decided to skip the hours of waiting and just subsist on cheetos for the night. We drove back to the North Shore and were delighted to find that the power was back on in Haleiwa. But as we drove past the town towards out cottage on Suneset beach, the coast line got eerily dark. Yep, the North Shore was the last place in Hawaii to get power, and of course that is where we were staying. At least we didn't feel like we had wasted $4.69 on a flashlight at wal-mart! We decided to just hit the bed early that night, so we put Braedyn down, filled out tummies with cheetos, and went to bed at a little before 9:00pm. At about 11:00pm we were woken to all the lights blazing on when the power was finally restored. Once we made the mad dash around turning them off before the kiddo woke up we went backe to bed.
All in all, the earthquake was pretty uneventful. The news made a lot bigger deal of it than it really was, at least here on the North Shore of Oahu. Most people here just went about their business (which is strickly centered around surfing) and made due without lights and stoves and tv's. The most amazing part of the whole thing was to be on the north shore at night with no lights on anywhere. It is amazingly dark when there is no man made lights and the moon and stars are covered by the clouds. That's all for our excitement for the day! Here's a picture of us hanging out that day.
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