#i like to think he was a refugee in england but that literally everyone hated him for being irish LMAAAAOOOO

[abijahfowler]

i love 2 think that abijah knows how to be fancy and act like an upperclass socialite because he is an EXCELLENT con man but that in reality back in london he was a poor street rat common criminal who just so happened to meet the right (“right?”) group of men willing to hire him for help on their shady business adventure into colonizing the east because he is very adaptable, relatively well educated (or at least intelligent and able to pick up on information fast) and that he is just really.. really good at what he does (being a crimnimal)

i love thinking of him having knowledge on how to dance the minuet like he was ever frequently in high class ballrooms because he had to learn it to blend in to case a joint

[semper-legens]

44. The Wall, by John Lanchester

Owned: No, library Page count: 276 My summary: It’s Kavanagh’s time patrolling the Wall. It’s important work. It’s only two years. Everyone has to do it. And once his time is up, he’ll have so many opportunities open to him. The only thing he needs to do is survive. If the Others come, they will kill him. So he has to make sure that doesn’t happen. My rating: 4/5

Well, this is an interesting piece of political commentary. No prizes for guessing what the titular Wall is inspired by. This is set in a dystopian future England, where the sea level has risen and refugees from around the world are trying to get into the country for, you know, refuge. Kavanagh’s job is to stand on the Wall and shoot people if they’re trying to get in. It’s a chilling look at the mundanity of prejudice and hate, and the kind of culture that fosters said hatred. I thought it was very effective, though I have to admit the ending kind of petered out.

The interesting thing about this sort of dystopia is that it’s so close to just real, modern life. This is what it’s like to live in regular England. There are bad things going on in the world, so we repel them from our borders. We pretend they are not happening, escalate conflicts until people are legitimately desperate and then demonise them for being desperate and responding to our violence with violence. Climate change has ruined large parts of the world, but that’s not our problem! We send young people to fight and die for us, but that’s normal! We literally enslave people, but that’s fine because we grant citizenship to their children! It’s a very plausible future version of England, and that fills me with shame.

So this is about a climate disaster, but it’s mostly a background detail - until Kavanagh gets put to sea, the climate disaster doesn’t really factor in. What’s important are the Others. This is the generic name for refugees coming into England, mostly fleeing said climate disaster. They can be from any other country, though the one whose origin is known is from Somalia, so you can bet there’s a race/xenophobia aspect to this. The Others are made...well, literally Other, dehumanised and made into a seething mass of violent criminals, never mind that their options are to try and break into England or attempt to live in the ocean. The government of England is terrible - if any Others get through the Wall, the same amount of soldiers are abandoned to the ocean, and that’s seen as being a natural, if sad, thing that happens. Kavanagh doesn’t think it can happen to him, until it does.

And the commentary here is subtle, which I appreciated. Kavanagh is bigoted against the Others, and doesn’t see the problem with them being made into Help (basically slaves) if they break through into England, or straight up murdered by the people on the Wall. The only problem he sees with using Help is a class issue for him - he’s more working class, and having Help is a status symbol as you have to pay the government for their use. Not to do with the inherent humanity of these people, oh no. He’s just worried about looking posh. And yeah, that’s what we’re like, as a culture. We’re ready to throw other people under the bus and only care about ourselves. Lanchester never draws attention to this, lets the reader come up with their own conclusions. Kavanagh doesn’t really learn a lesson about tolerance and understanding. He just...is. And I think that works for the story Lanchester is telling.

Next up, a different flavour of dystopia, as things go from bad to worse in the FAYZ.

[itsthefishdoctor-blog]

The United States of Delusion

I don’t even know what to say today y'all.

There has been just a massive amount of mind-boggling nonsense inundating us for the past week that I can’t feel anything other than overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed by the outrageous comments the president has made. I’m overwhelmed by the bold-faced LIES that he has spewed; overwhelmed by the hypocrisy of every single thing he has done and said.

I knew this was coming. I knew it when I cast my ballot for a woman I didn’t think was the best choice but wasn’t an absolute psychopath. I knew it when y'all told us to give him a chance because even though he hadn’t taken office, his hateful rhetoric had already changed the tone of our nation. To be honest, I’ve know it every single time the carrot has opened his mouth. I knew this was coming and I am STILL blown away.

And of course, I’m blown away by this clown. His presidency literally exceeds my comprehension. But what blows me away even more than his bullshit, is the lack of outrage from those of you who voted for him.

Y'all. This. Dude. Lied. To. You.

Not that this a new thing for him. He lied multiple times on the campaign trail (“lock her up” is still ringing particularly loud) and has continued to lie since he was elected. It literally is the most unreal sort of lying I’ve ever seen. It’s bold-faced and its over INSANE things. Like, who actually lies about doing/saying something they are well documented to have done/said? Seriously? WHO DOES THAT?

We’ve had politicians who lie before. That is not at all new, in fact its basically a requirement. But every single time we’ve caught them in a lie, they have to make a big public apology (which you wont accept) and then we hold it against them and call them a liar for the rest of their career. Example: Bill Clinton was not impeached because he had an affair. Bill Clinton was impeached because he LIED about having the affair. Which in comparison to the lies our new fearless leader is spewing, seem like child’s play. I won’t even begin to discuss the ridiculousness of that entire process (especially Trump’s use of it to undermine Bill’s wife and her run for president) but the hypocrisy is, once-again, mind blowing.

SO ANYWAYS.

I’ve posted a nice article on my facebook page choked full of the lies Donald Trump has spewed in the past week vs. the facts that actually happened here in the real world. Seriously, this blows my mind that these are things being debated. Read it or don’t, but I promise there is actual evidence that contradicts the crap the president has tried to make into facts. But that, again isn’t really the point of all this.

What we need to talk about right now, is the state of my country.

Because I am not entirely sure what is happening or who’s country this is anymore. If I’ve seen anything in the past week, it’s that Donald Trump is very well set on making this HIS country and he doesn’t give a flying fuck what he has to do or who he has to throw under the bus to get there.

And I don’t know why there are so many of my fellow citizens who voted for him who are not scared or downright pissed about this. Because y'all are the ones who trusted him. You chose to put your faith in a man and in the span of a week he has completely overhauled your country. I don’t know if you just don’t understand what all these executive orders mean (to be fair, there have been an exorbitant amount) or just don’t care because somehow they don’t apply to you. Because I’ve defended y'all. I have allowed you to justify your vote for other things but I’m done now. Because I’m not entirely sure there’s anything that man can say or do to make some of you even question him, let alone denounce his actions.

When you have a man in charge of the greatest free nation in the world telling the press what they can and cannot report, you are no longer a part of a free nation. When you have a president silencing SCIENTISTS and evidence-based facts, you no longer live in a safe nation. When you have a president using religion to decide who can and cannot enter our country, you no longer live in America (a nation literally founded by men running away from the nationalized Church of England).

The point is we have entered some sort of insane alternate universe where we call lies alternate facts. A world where we ignore hypocrisy unless its directed against our opponent. A place where we look the other way when something unjust happens that doesn’t apply to us. A nation that doesn’t make any damn sense and pretty much defies every single principle it was founded on.

So I’m gonna talk about hypocrisy for a second because its about damn time we start holding each other accountable.

You DO NOT get to criticize pro-life women at your women’s march. You DO NOT get to yell at people afraid to let in refugees when it took you five years to pay attention to the crisis in Syria. You DO NOT get to remain silent when a SNL writer says horrible things about Baron Trump because of who his father is. You DO NOT get to say Trump is not a “legitimate president”. You DO NOT get to remain silent when protesters destroy property or attack police. You DO NOT get to support the women’s march but stay silent to the Black Lives Matter movement. You DO NOT get to freak out about Republicans racism and make fun of Melania’s broken English. You DO NOT get to criticize the people who felt like they had no choice to vote for Trump when your party nominated a lackluster candidate through some pretty sketchy tactics. You DO NOT get to act like the ACA is affordable for most people or the best option for healthcare for our nation. You DO NOT get to remain silent when Madonna threatens to blow up the white house. You DO NOT get to act like illegal immigrants didn’t break the law.

You DO NOT get to preach to me about how you voted for Trump because he was financially conservative and then not lose your damn mind when he essentially forces you to pay for an utterly useless wall. You DO NOT get to tell me healthcare is too expensive to be a universal right but a billion dollar wall isn’t. You DO NOT get to talk to me about the Democrats ridiculous spending when the GOP wasted $7 million to investigate Hilary in Benghazi TWICE and who knows how much investigating Trump’s newest bullshit voter fraud claim. You DO NOT get to tell me you are pro-life and refuse to allow Syrian refugees into our country. You DO NOT get to say “what would Jesus do” to defend fetuses but not actual, fully formed humans. You DO NOT get to tell me radical Muslims pose more of a threat domestically than mentally ill white guys like Dylan Roof or Adam Lanza. You DO NOT get to get your panties in a wad about how we’ve become a “politically correct” country where you can’t say what you want and not BE UTTERLY TERRIFIED that the president has essentially put a gag order on the EPA, NASA, the National Park Service, etc. You DO NOT get to chant “drain the swamp” at your terrifying rallies and then remain silent when Trump builds a cabinet overflowing with the most under-qualified and swampiest, swamp monsters. You DO NOT get to demand to see President Obama’s birth certificate but not Trump’s tax returns. You DO NOT get to criticize peaceful protests against Trump’s low-class behavior when y'all protested Obama’s election because of his skin color. And you DEFINITELY DO NOT get to say celebrities need to stay out of politics when you fools elected one.

Y'all are afraid of ISIS and don’t understand how banning immigrants from ISIS’ stomping grounds feeds directly into their recruiters hands. How banning people from Muslim predominate countries (but not the most Muslim predominate countries and not the countries who have a history of attacking us) shows all the people who ISIS recruit just how horrible the Americans are. Y'all THREW THE BIGGEST FREAKING FIT EVER about Hilary’s freaking email server (even though most of us don’t even know what the heck a private email server is) and then are silent when Donald Trump’s administration has done the EXACT SAME THING. Y'all were up in arms about the Clinton Foundations international connections but look the other way when your president makes a bullshit executive order to ban Muslims only from countries he is convenient enough not to have financial ties to (and then believe the nonsense that Obama did the same thing in 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/29/trumps-facile-claim-that-his-refugee-policy-is-similar-to-obama-in-2011/?utm_term=.328b3f2a974d). You DO NOT get to highlight a portion of that executive order and claim our president refuses to support countries that oppress the LGBTQ community when he openly supports Putin.

Here’s the thing y'all. We need to figure out just what it is we stand for. Because I really don’t think anyone has any clue anymore. We’ve warped our views and beliefs to fit into certain political parties who have their own conflicting views. Republicans are conservative unless its something they want (like a wall). They want the government to stay out of their wallets but are okay with it in women’s reproductive organs. Democrats want everyone to be respected and then call every single Trump supporter a bigot/racist/oppressor. They want the government to stay out of their reproductive organs but provide them free birth control. These labels are only further examples of the division that has broken our country. We are so divided over words that don’t even represent well-organized ideas.

We’ve got to stop y'all. We have to come back to the ideas we were founded on. We weren’t meant to have a national religion. We weren’t meant to have just two political parties; as if that could possibly represent every single American adequately. We weren’t meant to deny immigrants when the founders themselves were immigrants.

But more than that, we need to be good humans. We need to help those who’s homelands have been destroyed because we refused to get involved until it was too late. We need to speak up about injustice in the world and demand action. We need to be kind and fair and generous and compassionate. We need to acknowledge when those we disagree with do the right thing. We need to call out the people we support when they do the wrong thing. We need to respect our fellow humans no matter who they are because, duh. Seriously, duh.

I say all of that knowing full well that even if all of that happens, we may not be any better off. I know that change is a hard thing for people to do and that a few people have a very difficult time changing the world. I know that President Trump will continue to do whatever he wants to do regardless of who it upsets. I know that most of us are too proud to admit, our “opponent” has some valid points.

But I have to say something and I have to try something. Because I feel SO FREAKING HOPELESS. Even though I have watched amazing things unfold in the past week to counter this monster of a president, I feel defeated.

I don’t know what is going to happen next and I’m truly terrified to find out. I can’t even begin to imagine how those of you are who aren’t a privileged white woman are feeling. I’m sorry for you. I really, really am. I want you to know that I’ve got your back and I will fight for you with every fiber of my being because I am grateful for your existence. And you matter. We, the people are the best part of this country and we are what makes America great. I will defend your right to be treated with respect and dignity no matter what. And I can only hope that enough people will do the same. I hope enough people can be as bold as Judge Ann Donnelly or the 3 million women who marched or John McCain who opposed Trump’s latest executive order.

I guess really all I can do right now is continue to hope. I hope we continue to stand up for each other even if its for people who are totally different than us or people we will never meet. I hope that we can all figure out what really matters is the type of people we are and the values we hold and act on. I hope we can be the type of people who inspire others to overcome hate and can bring the generation behind us into a better, more respectful world.

I know this is all very Mean Girls-esque but I sincerely wish I had a big ass plastic crown to break apart and throw at everyone. Because really, y'all are beautiful and if Cady Heron can figure out how to apologize for being a bitch and try to make amends for it in a two hour film, I think our country can probably get through the next four years without pushing anyone in front of a bus.

(That’s a crappy Mean Girls reference; please don’t push people in front of busses)

-Be kind to one another-

also a friendly reminder this blog is for me and possible future nuggets who I want to remember that their mom was definitely not cool with all this bullshit they’ll have to learn in history class. And also for anyone who feels as shitty as I do and needs some love ✌️️

[galleryyuhself]

Clare Hollingworth, Reporter Who Broke News of World War II, Dies at 105

By MARGALIT FOX

From a single gust of wind, Clare Hollingworth reaped the journalistic scoop of the century.

Ms. Hollingworth, the undisputed doyenne of war correspondents, who died on Tuesday in Hong Kong at 105, was less than a week into her first job, as a reporter for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, on that windy day in 1939.

Driving alone on the road from Gleiwitz, then in Germany, to Katowice, in Poland — a distance of less than 20 miles — she watched as the wind lifted a piece of the tarpaulin that had been erected on the German side to screen the valley below from view.

Through the opening, Ms. Hollingworth saw, she later wrote, “large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns” concealed in the valley.

She knew then that Germany was poised for a major military incursion. Hastening back across the border to the Polish side, she telephoned her editor with the news, a world exclusive.

Continue reading the main story The date was Aug. 28, 1939, and her article, published the next day, would become, as the British paper The Guardian wrote in 2015, “probably the greatest scoop of modern times.”

On Sept. 1, Hitler’s forces invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II.

For the next four decades, Ms. Hollingworth (who over the years contributed articles to The Telegraph, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal) covered World War II from Eastern Europe, the Balkans and North Africa; the Greek and Algerian civil wars; hostilities between Arabs and Jews in the waning days of the British mandate in Palestine; and the Vietnam War, among other conflicts.

Often under fire, occasionally arrested and possessed of such a keen nose for covert information that from time to time she was accused of being a spy — both by local governments and by the British — Ms. Hollingworth was friend, or foe, to seemingly everyone in a position of power in the world at midcentury.

Ms. Hollingworth in 1985. Credit United News/Popperfoto, via Getty Images She obtained the first interview with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi after he became the shah of Iran in 1941, and what was very likely among the last, after he was deposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

In 1965, wanting to cover hostilities between India and Pakistan but discovering that reporters were barred from the front, she simply secured permission from an old acquaintance, Indira Gandhi, who was then India’s minister of information and broadcasting.

Ms. Hollingworth was also one of the first Western journalists to report regularly from China, opening The Telegraph’s Beijing bureau in 1973.

Her other major scoops included a 1963 article for The Guardian in which she cautiously identified the British intelligence agent Kim Philby as the long-sought “third man” in the ring of Soviet spies then known to include the Englishmen Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Another was a 1968 article for The Telegraph in which she reported the United States’ incipient plans for peace talks with Vietnam. (The talks opened in Paris later that year and were concluded in 1973.)

Ms. Hollingworth was never so happy, she often said, as when she was roaming the world equipped with little more than a toothbrush, a typewriter and, if need be, a revolver. Embedded long before the term was applied to journalists, she slept in trucks and in trenches, at times buried up to her neck in sand for warmth on cold desert nights. She once held off an armed Algerian policeman by threatening to hit him about the head with a shoe.

Had her eyesight not begun to fail some 20 years ago, it was a life, Ms. Hollingworth made clear, that she would gladly have continued to the end of her days.

“I must admit that I enjoy being in a war,” she told The Telegraph in 2011, on the eve of her 100th birthday.

In 1989, though nearly 80 and nominally retired, Ms. Hollingworth, attired in a safari suit, her working uniform of choice for 60 years, was spotted in Tiananmen Square shinnying up a lamppost for a bird’s-eye view of the government’s violent crackdown against civilian protesters.

She periodically slept on the floor of her home in Hong Kong well into her 90s, just to keep from going soft.

Through all her travels, with all their attendant rigors, there was only one thing, Ms. Hollingworth said, that she truly could not abide. “I do not mind not washing for a week or more,” she wrote, “but I do hate getting fleas in my hair.”

Her Graham Greene existence, with its typewriter, revolver and most particularly its fleas, was a far cry from the life her conventional, well-heeled British parents had envisioned for her — one of quiet propriety, dutiful wifehood, charity balls and hunting.

Clare Hollingworth was born on Oct. 10, 1911, in Knighton in central England, outside Leicester. As a child, she enjoyed touring the historic battlefields of England and France with her father, who ran the family’s boot and shoe factory.

At her parents’ insistence, the young Ms. Hollingworth attended domestic science college in Leicester, an experience that did nothing to make the prospect of hearth and home attractive. (“Although it is useful to be able to make an omelet,” she later wrote, “my domestic science training caused me to hate having anything to do with housework.”)

Partly in deference to her upbringing, she became engaged “to a suitable young man,” though she soon broke off the engagement and further scandalized her parents by announcing her intention to become a journalist.

“My mother thought journalism frightfully low, like a trade,” Ms. Hollingworth said in the 2011 interview with The Telegraph. “She didn’t believe anything journalists wrote and thought they were only fit for the tradesmen’s entrance.”

In the 1930s, Ms. Hollingworth attended the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and afterward studied at the University of Zagreb, then in Yugoslavia.

Working for the League of Nations Union, a peace and social justice group established in Britain in 1918, she was dispatched to Warsaw.

There, in early 1939, she aided thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland — the region of Czechoslovakia that had been annexed by the Nazis in October 1938 — arranging travel documents that would let them cross into Poland. She wrote about their plight for small publications in Britain.

The Telegraph learned of Ms. Hollingworth’s work in Poland, and on Aug. 25, 1939, while she was visiting London, it hired her as a correspondent. Assigned to cover the prelude to war in the region, she flew to Warsaw the next day.

From Warsaw she traveled to Katowice, commandeering an official car from the British consul general there. It was in that car, Union Jack boldly flying, that she drove over the border, past astonished Nazi guards and into Germany on Aug. 28.

Ms. Hollingworth’s scoop comprised two parts. The first was her story of Aug. 29, about the advent of war. The second was her report on the start of the war itself.

Awakened by explosions at dawn on Sept. 1, Ms. Hollingworth, from her quarters in Katowice, saw German bombers overhead and the flash of artillery fire in the distance.

She telephoned a friend at the British Embassy in Warsaw.

“The war has begun!” she cried.

“Are you sure, old girl?” he said. Her published article notwithstanding, Ms. Hollingworth later wrote, British officialdom persisted in thinking that war remained weeks away.

She held the receiver out the window as German tanks roared outside. The embassy was persuaded and soon, too, was her editor.

Ms. Hollingworth’s article on the start of hostilities appeared in The Telegraph the next day. Her work from this period is unbylined — few reporters were accorded bylines then — a state of affairs she pronounced as being for the best: It simultaneously spared her parents familial anxiety and social indignity.

What followed was more than 40 years of chasing danger, for it was in the most dangerous places, Ms. Hollingworth often said, that the best stories lay.

Traveling with British troops in North Africa, she was buried in the sands for the night when she awoke to the sounds of a German reconnaissance party. “A sneeze would have brought death to us all,” she later wrote. She held her breath in the darkness, and the party passed unseeing.

In Vietnam, a sniper’s bullet narrowly missed her head.

Ms. Hollingworth’s first husband, Vandeleur Robinson, whom she married in 1936, divorced her for desertion 15 years later. (“When I’m on a story, I’m on a story — to hell with husband, family, anyone else,” she told The Guardian in 2004.) Her second husband, Geoffrey Hoare, a journalist whom she married in the early 1950s, died in 1965.

Her death was confirmed by Patrick Garrett, her grandnephew and her biographer. Her survivors include a stepdaughter, Hilary Sandre.

Over time, some members of the British press grew alienated by what they saw as Ms. Hollingworth’s imperious manner. “Ms. Hollingworth’s snobberies are very tiring, her cozy relations with British embassies irritating,” the English journalist Robert Fisk wrote, reviewing her 1990 memoir, “Front Line.”

But she remained a widely admired, even venerated, figure, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire in 1982 and a perennial fixture at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, where she had made her home since the early 1980s.

Her other books include “The Three Weeks’ War in Poland” (1940), “There’s a German Just Behind Me” (1942), “The Arabs and the West” (1952) and “Mao and the Men Against Him” (1985).

As Ms. Hollingworth made clear in later interviews, though there was no dearth of wars to accompany her old age, she did not truly expect to be called upon to cover them. Yet to the end of her life she slept with her passport and a pair of shoes within easy reach, just in case.

[sophiesjourney]

In 2017 I was unfortunate enough to be in Houston when Hurricane Harvey hit on my 27th birthday. I knew it was coming and yet nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed that day.

When I look back and write this I feel like it’s all very over dramatic but actually what I felt that day was genuine fear and sadness. I am one of the very lucky ones that didn’t lose anything and have only a small mental scar from the experience but there are people that literally lost everything in what was titled the ‘costliest tropical cyclone on record’.

It is nearly a whole year since the disaster and actually even just writing this makes me feel emotionally stressed. At least 107 people died in the storm and the devastation it caused to thousands of people was terrible. People are still trying to rebuild their lives even now. When I look at the photographs I took that day it makes me shudder.

I am very lucky to live in England where despite us complaining about the weather every single day, we literally know nothing about how bad weather can really be. I am unlucky enough to have been caught up in three hurricanes, major lightning storms, two minor earthquakes and caught a glimpse of a tornado but I would rather not have witnessed any of these things! I hope to never wake up to warnings like these ever again.

I have never talked about my experience openly on my blog or online elsewhere and I actually wouldn’t like to try relive it to tell the tale. However, when I was over there I was approached by The Guardian and I have the write up I wrote as soon as we were safe again. Today is the first time i’ve read it since writing it. So here is my story:

After 3 flights from Leeds to London, London to Dallas, Dallas to Houston and being stuck in a thunderstorm on the plane unable to leave the aircraft we were finally released in to Houston.

We attempted to leave the airport twice. The first time was around midnight when we first arrived at the airport. The storm had just began and nobody knew how flooded it was outside so taxis were still running. There was limited cabs and many people trying to leave the airport so they grouped people together based on their location. We got grouped with 3 separate people from Houston who were trying to get to relatives in midtown and we were trying to get to our hotel in downtown. The rain was awful and it was dark so we could barely see where we were going. It was awful. The roads weren’t flooded yet until we reached the end of a highway and saw cars floating in water. The taxi man wanted to try go through but we all said no.

We tried calling local hotels and all were full so eventually we ended up back at the airport around 3am. There was only 3 of us at this point as 2 had got out along the way and decided to sleep in lobby’s of hotels. By the time we got back to the airport the taxi fare was $90 and the taxi man wanted us to pay that per person as we were all travelling separately! He would have made nearly $500 for one ride.

Absolutely outstanding that the taxi man was trying to make money off desperate individuals! There were moments on the journey that the driver was going to attempt to drive further in to the darkness where we couldn’t see how deep the water was. I have never felt so afraid in my life especially when drowning is one of my biggest fears! A few of us screamed out to him to turn back and eventually we did.

That night we headed to The Marriott hotel adjacent to the airport. We had nowhere to go and they told us there were no rooms available. A lady took pity on us and gave us a refugee room to sleep in. After a few hours there were a lot of people in there that appeared to be on their own with nowhere to stay also. The room was just a meeting room so we found a sofa and nestled under our towels with our belongings close by.

The next day we managed to catch an Uber with Morgan who we had met in the previous taxi. 6am we left and we tried every exit possible to get to downtown. All were blocked so we headed to a place called Sugarland (around 40 miles away) in hope we could get back to downtown through a different exit. The guy we were with got out of the taxi here safely to meet his girlfriend at her house. Her family welcomed us in and let us dry off, use the bathroom and they even gave us fruit for the journey back. They said we should stay in Sugarland as it’s safer but we knew deep down that if we did that we would end up stranded there and find it even harder to continue our journey.

So we continued and it was then just us two and Jose the driver. We tried every possible route and at one point drove into water that was too deep by accident. It was a scary moment but luckily we managed to reverse out of it. I’m sure you can imagine how I was feeling at that point.

We headed back to the airport via a gas station where we gave Jose cash to fill up in order for him to get home afterwards. He lived close by to the airport luckily. We were back at the airport around 12pm. Jose was great company and helped us as much as he could, we were his only passengers that day. He was so happy to have spent the morning with us that he wanted selfies with us and we even spoke to his daughters on the phone. They were scared because a tornado was heading for their home. We now have his contact details so he can visit us when he comes to England. At the gas station he allowed us time to stock up on snacks and the picture of me eating is the only food I ate that day.

When we arrived back at the airport and headed to the Marriott we were refused entry because the hotel was now open to guests only. We were unable to book a room as all was full and not allowed entry to the restaurant and bar. It was truly horrific seeing everyone be kicked out and refused the ability to get any food. We wandered the airport aimlessly for hours hoping that on an off chance we might be able to catch a flight out of there. Everything was closed. There were people sleeping on the floor, people crying, people distressed. I had a breakdown because there was nowhere to eat, nowhere to go and no options, it was really upsetting. The houses flooded and abandoned cars I’d seen for the hours we’d been on the roads was playing on my mind and I felt completely trapped. Every flight was cancelled and the airport was shut down completely. We were stuck on the side of the airport for exiting and so there was no food merchants. I was contemplating how long the snacks in my suitcase could last me for.

We made friends with other people stranded and heard their stories of where they were from and where they were going. It was then that people started coming together and coming up with crazy ideas that might get us out of there. One crazy idea that might actually work – As there was so many stranded crew and pilots from previous flights in the airport they decided to gear up a plane and create a flight that everybody could get on. Volunteer crew from all airlines banded together to create what can only be described as a SUPER CREW to create a one way flight to Chicago. The central hub for getting us all back to wherever we needed to be. There was minimal security checks, no assigned seats, no major check in process. We were all just so desperate to escape the danger zone that we would have flown anywhere at that point on anything! Everybody was so relieved the mood completely shifted. Some of our new friends even bought us food as they had received so many compensation vouchers that they couldn’t spend it all themselves. I was so excited by the prospect of just eating anything at all at that point!

Since heading to Chicago we have  stayed in an airport hotel and now luckily have managed to have our return flight changed for free by British Airways and will fly home on Saturday from Chicago to Heathrow. We’re now staying in China Town and have decided to spend our week in Chicago so we can at least get a holiday and relax after the trauma! Of course it is all at our own expense though, whilst our flights have been free and we are thankful for that we have spent a lot on taxis and hotels as a result of the hurricane but it could have been much worse so I’m thankful to be safe now!

Written by Sophie on 28th August 2017

Reading this and reflecting on my experience first of all I want to thank United Airlines for making the flight possible. Without them I don’t know what will have happened. We know now that the rain and flooding continued for days and I dread to think what everybody would have done for food and water at the airport if we weren’t transported out of there.

Jose the taxi driver has since got in touch with me with photographs of his home. The below photograph he has taken from his house. He has lost everything in the floods and can no longer work as his taxi is ruined. I am so thankful to this man for trying to help us that day. I wish there was a way I could do more to help him back. I aim to reach out to him again soon to see how his life is now.

Morgan and his family keeping us company and taking care of us briefly in Sugarland was a real help. All the people we met in the airport made everyone feel safe and a little more calm than we could have been.

And finally British Airways allowing us to fly home from Chicago at no extra cost was a life saver. We also managed to get a full refund on all of our hotels for that week, our NFL tickets, bus tickets and hostels. I really appreciate all the companies that were so accommodating during the stressful time.

I have a lot of people say to me that it sounds like an experience and that they think it would be cool to ‘chase storms’. Please come back to me and say that again once you’ve actually been anywhere near the devastation. Because I hate to be a party pooper but it’s really not cool to chase storms…

I’m aware that my experience of Hurricane Harvey is a mild one and I’m so lucky to be able to sit here and even write this safe and sound. I think it’s important to write about your personal experiences – I like to blog about my travel stories whether good or bad and looking back on this really makes me appreciate what a lucky escape I had and how fortunate I am to live where I live now.

If you have any questions or enjoyed reading please feel free to leave me a comment.

Hurricane Harvey: My story In 2017 I was unfortunate enough to be in Houston when Hurricane Harvey hit on my 27th birthday.