I woke up confused, with a sharp cramp in my neck. The rolled up blanket I had been using for a pillow proved to be just as uncomfortable as my hard, lumpy messenger bag. I fancied myself a true traveler at heart, rugged and adventurous, possessing an iron constitution that can metabolize any exotic food, the guy who finds all the spots the tourists don’t know about and no matter what doesn’t panic when plans change suddenly. That night trapped in a Radisson Hotel, I clearly wasn’t living up to my own image of myself.

I uncoiled my body from the fetal ball I had been forced to curl into, rolled over slowly and discovered that my boyfriend Joe was not next to me. Last I knew he had been. It was hard to focus my eyes in the eerie hue of muted red being projected from emergency lights. The air was stale and overly humid. I could hear the murmurings of quiet chatter, the occasional snore. A myriad of unpleasant smells wafted in the air. When you lock two-hundred people into a room designed to hold less than half of that, with no AC, windows or any other method to circulate air, this is what you get. It may be a little dramatic, but for that moment, I thought I knew what a refugee felt like. Only, a refugee must go through this for months and often years at a time; as it was, I was stuck in Cancun only one extra day because of Hurricane Emily.

I got up off the hard floor, feeling the cramps in nearly every muscle I had, and cautiously tip-toed over bodies and in the spaces between crisscrossed limbs. People had scrunched up as much as possible, avoiding touching anyone else, which wasn’t easy. Even in such circumstances, people seem to want their own personal space. It was cooler in the lobby, but just as quiet. I could hear the faintest whistle of wind behind the closed off and blacked-out glass doors that had sealed us in hours ago. The hotel was so insulated that for the rest of the night I couldn’t tell what exactly was going on outside, if trees were being hurled through the air and roofs ripped off of houses.

I eventually found Joe, spread eagle on the stone floor, stomach down, his face pressed up against the legs of a couch that was occupied by our new friend Grace. Anyone else would have probably thought Joe had wound up in that position after suffering head trauma and collapsing to the ground, but I knew better; like a lizard, he was cooling himself on the cold, stone floor. I couldn’t sleep after that, so I sat at one of the small tables in the center of the lobby, and took out a cigarette. I was unsettled, sore from sleeping on the floor, sluggish from the heat, emotionally drained from the chaos of the previous 24 hours.

The night before we had made friends with a few of the couples who had been evacuated off their island resorts and re-settled at our hotel. Grace and her husband Bill were among those we chatted with at the small bar in the central lobby of our hotel. Grace and Bill were in their fifties, gentle, from Texas. She ran her own trophy store; he was retired. Joe and I tried not to seem smug about the fact that our vacation had gone as planned, that we were catching our scheduled flight out in the morning, which the airlines confirmed that day was one of the last leaving Cancun. It seemed that we would be missing hurricane Emily without even having to try.

We said good-bye to our friends and left after a quick breakfast the next morning. While driving down the main road through the Hotel Zona, I observed all the resorts sitting defenselessly against a surprisingly calm-looking ocean. At the airport we stood at the back of a long, twisted line of people that did not move. Announcements in English and Spanish alerted passengers that many flights were being canceled even though, so far, the sky was simply cloudy. Even though we had been assured the night before that our flight would be leaving as scheduled, I had a strange feeling that something wasn’t right. An employee, the only Mexican I ever saw with flaming red hair and pale skin splashed with freckles, stood close by and I asked about our flight number.

“All flights have been canceled,” he said with a lazy sweep of his arm.

“But we were told-”

“The government has cancelled all flights. I suggest you both find shelter,” he said indifferently, and then added “You cannot stay in the airport.”
I looked at Joe; Joe looked at me. I felt like I was falling, a heavy stone in shallow water, and from the look in Joe’s wide eyes, I could tell he was close to panic as well. The problem was, the moment we had checked out of our hotel, our all-inclusive package had ended. The hotel was no longer responsible for our safety during this time, and we didn’t know what shelter they had gone to. We were two people in a sea of hundreds scrambling to get out of the way of a hurricane descending upon us.

We called the hotel but no one answered. I told Joe it would be okay but I don’t either of us was letting go of our anxiety that easily. Then we decided to ask for help from the same car service that had been driving us. We gave a driver the name of the hotel we had stayed at and asked if he knew where their shelter was. He didn’t answer, but led us to a van sitting idly by itself. We were relieved, if not somewhat unsure of what precisely we were doing there, when suddenly other stranded tourists began to climb aboard our van, everyone wondering out loud what was going to happen.

Then a tall, thin man with a large mustache jumped briskly into the driver’s seat.

“Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Juan and I will be your driver. I’d like to welcome you personally to Cancun. You know, in Spanish, the word ‘Cancun’ means ‘nest of snakes’”. Whether he noticed our expressions, I have no idea. If he did, he clearly didn’t seem to care as he drove us back towards the hotel Zona. Outside the sky was turning a dull greenish-blue, the wind starting to pick up slightly. By this time, the resorts were eerily quiet, everyone having gone to their designated shelters. For long stretches, we were the only car on the road, this van full of displaced tourists, desperate to find shelter from the impending elements, and forced to listen to our driver’s fun facts about Cancun and Mexico in general.

The way the evacuation was set up, all the shelters were in downtown Cancun, away from the ocean. Each hotel had its own designated shelter. Apparently, the location of each shelter was kept secret, since no one seemed to know where any were. Each time we discovered a new shelter, our driver would talk to those in charge to try to figure out if any of his passengers belonged there. Sometimes it was no one, and the only thing happy go-lucky Juan got out of the conversation was a clue about where the next shelter might be located. Sometimes people did in fact match up with the shelter; a young couple was dropped off at an elementary school, while an elderly pair was let off at the local prison, which for that night was housing both criminals and tourists.

All this time, Juan careened his van through downtown Cancun like Mr. Toad. As one hour turned into two, the likelihood that we would weather the hurricane in the van while looking for our shelter grew. Joe remained quiet, which was not a good sign. I tried to pay attention to the scenery to take my mind off the nausea creeping into my stomach. Finally, after what seemed like several hours, Juan discovered that the shelter our hotel had been evacuated to was a Radisson Hotel. Overcome with relief, we climbed out of the van, and started to collect our luggage when a large, blustering man, who turned out to be the manager of the Radisson, started to yell. Juan turned to us, looking serious for the first time.

“He says you cannot stay here. He says they are full.” Images of Joe and I wandering the streets in hurricane force winds, or being locked into a Mexican prison cell, or worse, being driven for one more minute by this lunatic, all swam in my head. We showed the manager our all-inclusive bracelets from the hotel, begged and pleaded and finally, when all else failed, gave him a good old fashioned inconvenienced American attitude. But it was Grace, who happened to be standing in the entrance, who managed to convince the manager. She immediately sized up the situation, grabbed us both by the wrists and assured the manager that we could stay in her room. He relented, but set us with an ugly stare as we collected our luggage and thanked Grace profusely, who merely whispered “You may re-think that when you see where we’re sleeping.” I didn’t really care. I was glad to have found shelter at last, although I did laugh when Grace showed us the four by six foot imaginary rectangle of floor that she and Bill had claimed as their own in the large event room that was now hosting all those displaced. This is what she had referred to as her “room.” The four of us sat in the conference room and talked, laughing about how crazy this all was. Eventually we lay down and the room grew quiet and at some point, I fell asleep, only to awaken later to find Joe and Grace gone.

After my cigarette in the main lobby, despite how uncomfortable it was, I curled back up on the floor of the conference room and fell back asleep. By morning, the worst of Emily had passed. We were able to get a flight out that afternoon. We said good-bye to our friends, got a cab, and drove to the airport. While the hurricane had in fact been quick, we drove through flooded streets and passed up-rooted trees. Traffic lights were not working; power lines were down. We learned later that the Hotel Zona had been hit particularly hard.

At some point on the flight home I remembered to ask Joe about sleeping on the lobby floor. Apparently, neither he nor Grace had been able to go to sleep in the conference room and so at some point had ventured out into the lobby.

“You should have seen the storm. It was crazy!”

“Wait, you saw it?”
“Yeah. They let us go out by the pool, under that awning thing. It was pretty crazy.”
‘Why didn’t you wake me up?”
He fixed me with a knowing look. “Wake you up? Nick, you know no one can wake you up.”

It is true; I am a very heavy sleeper. I was disappointed to have missed the actual storm, incredulous that I had slept through it. A hurricane! And then, as that thought rolled around in my head, I started to feel a little better about myself. Yeah, I had been scared and anxious and all the rest, but I could at the very least say that I had slept through a hurricane. Maybe I was more of an experienced travel than I gave myself credit for.

Nick J. Perez is an online psychology student with a B.A. in English Literature from SUNY New Paltz. Having grown up in Los Angeles and New York’s Hudson Valley Region, he currently lives and works in Philadelphia.