I'd heard of "hurricane parties," but this was my first "after-hurricane party."
A bunch of people, some family and some friends, had gathered in a darkened house on a darkened street in a darkened town on lower Cape Cod, about 40 miles off the Massachusetts coast.
A dozen candles cast spooky shadows across the walls and over the company, all of whom had lost power two days earlier when the remnants of Hurricane Irene, which hit our neck of the woods as Tropical Storm Irene, blew across the cape with a ferocity we hadn't seen since the "No-Name Wind Storm" of December 2006.
With no electricity, it wouldn't be long before everything in our refrigerators would spoil, so this was our "eat whatever looks like it won't kill you" potluck.
Irene hit Sunday morning, Aug. 28. By that time the vast majority of tourists already had barreled west across our two bridges, fearing that if or when the winds hit 70 mph, the bridges would shut down, leaving no way to get across the Cape Cod Canal (unless you had a boat or were an exceptionally good swimmer).
I'd been out on the beach Friday night for a swim before the weather turned ugly, and I overheard one visitor yelling at her two teenage children: "No! We're leaving from here! Those bridges are going to close!"
I chuckled. The storm was still two days off.
But leave they did, along with thousands of other tourists who snarled westbound traffic along most of the Mid-Cape Highway that night and much of Saturday.
Some 220,000 of us live on this spit of land year-round. Our population triples between July Fourth and Labor Day, and most of the local folks make the bulk of their annual income during that time.
Besides the anxiety that comes with boarding up stores, securing the ferries and closing down fish shacks, Cape Cod tourism businesses faced an unknown loss of their already-limited seasonal revenue.
Torrential rain was beating down on others across the commonwealth, but we had nothing more than a measly few drops, what's known locally as: "It's spitting outside."
Power went out after the first few strong gusts of wind early Sunday morning. We heard a transformer up the road go "whomp!" and that was the end of our electricity.
For most of us, it meant the end of plumbing, too, since our pumps need electricity to get water out of our wells and into our homes.
Some tourists decided to ride out the storm in their rental homes, and they were even more flummoxed than we were. On Monday morning I navigated several road closures -- there were downed trees and branches everywhere -- and headed into town looking for a hot cup of coffee and a place to plug in my computer. Outside the few coffee shops that had managed to open, parking lots sported a number of out-of-state plates.
I was impressed. They'd stayed, these wandering denizens of New York and Connecticut, Texas and Maryland. They're crazy, I thought. Cape Cod could have been walloped big time. But here they were, looking around, puzzled and waiting in long lines for something to eat.
I guess their reasoning is akin to why people come here looking for great white shark fins in the water: curiosity.
We have a great white situation here, if you haven't heard, thanks to federal protection of the gray seal population. Seals are the great white's favorite food, so now we've got thousands of both along the Atlantic coast. Tourists stand atop our beach cliffs and use binoculars to look out over the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of a fin. They usually don't, though; our great whites aren't show-offs.
Without running water, we were forced to make many trips to our town's public spigot, where we and lots of others filled up I don't know how many gallon jugs for various uses inside our houses.
All the while I kept thinking: "I'm supposed to be in Dublin now, climbing aboard Azamara Club Cruises' luxury ship Journey." The next day I thought: "I'm supposed to be in Wales right now, during a port call on the Journey." And at night, as I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I thought: "I'm supposed to be sitting down to an elegant dinner with Azamara President Larry Pimentel right now and learning the secrets of his trade."
I had been invited on Pimentel's annual President's Cruise, which was sailing from Dublin on Aug. 29. That adventure had to be scrapped when Logan Airport canceled all Sunday flights.
Our power finally kicked in on Wednesday, and when I look back on this storm I don't think I'll remember the frustrations and the ice-cold showers as much as the sitting around by candlelight and being darn glad that none of us was injured or dead and that the damage to our homes and businesses wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been.
As for Cape Cod's tourism economy, it will survive. It always does.
For my part, I've had it with life in the 19th century. At least until the next big storm comes calling.
Contact Donna Tunney, Travel Weekly's cruise editor, at [email protected].