A Little Too Close for Comfort

This past weekend a string of fires broke out in Southern California.

Early Saturday morning we saw smoke rising from the fire in Yorba Linda (less than 10 miles from us). When we arrived home in the afternoon, we learned that the fire had jumped the freeway and was also in Anaheim Hills. We live on the other side of the hill from Anaheim Hills! That's when it started getting pretty scary. Down the hill from us is lots of brush, so if any embers flew our way and hit that, then we'd have a fire on our hands also. Luckily (for us), the wind was blowing away from us.

We were glued to the news trying to figure out exactly where the fire was. We saw TONS of people fleeing the Anaheim Hills area in their cars. It was like a massive exodus.

We heard that it was right behind the Costco we go to and actually burned a building in the same shopping center.

There were so many huge million dollar houses that were damaged or destroyed. It was really unbelievable!

Cuong's parents were supposed to come over and have dinner with us on Saturday night. Apparently they had put a police officer at the bottom of our major street who was turning people away. It took them about 1 1/2 hours to move just 200 yards.

I walked down to the corner to see if I could see what was going on. I brought the camera along:

This was when I was on the corner of our street looking up towards the Anaheim Hills/Yorba Linda area.

This is our house, along with LOTS of smoke!

Next I walked down to the major street that Cuong's parents were trying to get up. On a clear day, you can get a glimpse of the ocean, but today it was all smoke. I think it will be a while until there is any views of the ocean.

From the major street corner looking back up towards Anaheim Hills/Yorba Linda. That's our house on the right.

Since it was getting pretty close and embers were flying all over the place, I started making up an "Evacuation Packing List". I even started putting all of my scrapbooking stuff my the door. These are my albums and pictures....it looks like so much more stuff once I pulled it out of the cabinets.