WOW. When they say evacuate - EVACUATE. Sunday night my wife and I went to sleep around 10:00PM with the fires 10 miles away. Throughout the night the air quality got worse and we kept waking up coughing. At 4:00AM we noticed an increase of emergency traffic (i.e. sirens). At 5:00AM we got a reverse 911 call - well, kind of - we never actually HEARD the message - our neighbor was banging on our door at 5:30AM.

So, after that we casually got our stuff together, got the dogs in the car, and pulled out into the heaviest traffic I have ever seen. We live on the intersection of Duenda and West Bernardo. As we turned onto West Bernardo into dead stop traffic we saw the flames burning a church. It took over an hour to get onto the highway - and our house is less than a mile away. I was very concerned with the fire catching up our car. The wind was horrible, too. Ash, leaves, branches, and embers were blowing over the hood of my car at 30-50 mph. It reminded me of a black snow storm. Visiblity was very poor.

We made it to the highway and to my parents house in Point Loma and have spent the last couple of days anxiously watching the television. My wife and I are lucky as our house is still standing - we saw it on a news broadcast during a helicopter fly over. Other than that we know very little. Hopefully we'll be able to return home sometime today.

In retrospect, fire is very real and travels at an incredible rate when fanned by the right type of winds. When you are told to evacuate get out as quickly as possible.