my story of evacuation

Sunday afternoon my parents left for Ventura to attend a conference while my brother was ministering to people in Thailand. I was home for the evening and had invited Nicole to spend the evening with me. Around 6pm, Jael was evacuated from Ramona and came to our home. By midnight, we heard the fires were headed toward San Pasqual Valley and The Wild Animal Park. Nicole got some sleep while Jael and I laid awake in bed watching the news until 2:30am. By that time, I knew that parts of Escondido had been evacuted but had NO idea the fires were coming toward Rancho Bernardo. I woke up again at 4am and decided to start packing the house while I still had time. By 4:30am, we received a phone call (possibly the reverse 911) but there was no one on the other line. I woke up Nicole and the three of us began packing. I also called my parents and asked them what I should pack ... I think they were shocked ... little did we know that the fire was already entering our neighborhood. Nicole began packing our cars around 6am while I kept pulling stuff out of our closests. At that point, people will driving through the neighborhood honking their horns and Nicole could hear police sirens in the distance and police on megaphones telling people to evacuate. We jumped in our cars just before 7am and began our looooong travel through the town. We took a back road that led us away from the fires (hoping it would be a quick drive to the freeway). What normally takes 15-20min to get to the freeway, ended up taking us 3 HOURS!!! At that point, the news was reporting that "Westwood" (my neighborhood) was burning. I was in shock ... it was very surreal. We were trying to get to Temecula to my grandma's home, but the freeways were closed and we made it only as far as Oceanside (took 5 hours!). We spent the next few days reading over lists of addresses of homes that had burned ... our home was never listed. Today we are back in our home and our heart goes out to our many neighbors who have lost their homes. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. We walked through the neighborhood this week, took some photos (below) and heard some incredible stories from those who fled just in time.