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'Another day in paradise'

Residents of beach communities - those who evacuated and those who stayed - are relieved they were spared the fearsome force of Hurricane Charley. "Normalcy," said one, "is a great thing."

CLEARWATER BEACH - Marty Donovan pulled a white Escalade up his Island Way driveway, relieved. When he fled to Orlando earlier Friday, he feared he'd return to a house in shambles.

Instead, a little after 6 p.m. Friday, Donovan's waterfront, ranch-style home was as he'd left it. Plywood and all.

"Oh good Lord. My house is here," said Donovan, a 40-year beach real estate agent. "We expected it would be gone. I never thought I'd be so excited to see things."

Donovan flipped off his sneakers. Then he zipped through the house to make sure his eyes weren't lying. His tan carpet was clean. His chairs, even the throne with the lions for armrests, were untouched. The bearskin rug still looked tough.

"Oh, the bearskin rug," he said.

All over the beach, people returned to homes they feared might be lost to find them untouched. And they contemplated, once again, the tradeoffs they make to live on the Gulf of Mexico.

"We get to live another day in paradise," said Karen Stevens, who watched the sunset Friday with a glass of red wine.

Donovan unpacked his SUV - three dogs, five turtles and a cat named Angel. All finished, he went to a bar to celebrate Charley's course change.

Craig and Barb Robbins beat him there. In fact, they partied all day. The couple disobeyed evacuation orders and spent much of Friday at a neighborhood bar with friends. When emergency officials said Charley might hit, they mocked the warnings by putting on bright-orange life jackets.

"We were prepared. We knew it could be a Category 4 hitting us," Barb Robbins said. "But it was either leave the island and have no idea when you can get back or stay and tough it out for 12 hours. We chose to fill the coolers full of beer."

Catherine and Gerard MacDonald and their cat, Lola, on the other hand, spent a hard night at an economy motel on the mainland in Clearwater. "It was a very bad situation, a lot of roaches and things," Catherine MacDonald said.

She was ecstatic to return to an unscathed home in Island Estates on Friday evening.

"I was so glad to see everything was just as we left it," she said, as she unpacked a coffee maker from her car. "We are so glad to be home. I'm glad our county was spared."

As she faced the task of undoing storm preparations, like returning outside furniture back outside, MacDonald said she might not be as quick to evacuate if faced with similar warnings.

"I'm not quite sure," she said. "The stress of leaving your home is a major emotional undertaking."

Now comes the task, she said, of getting everything back to normal.

"Normalcy is a great thing," she said.

Around the corner, Alex Eckelberry and his wife and four children returned to their waterfront home after spending a day with a friend who lives on higher ground in Clearwater.

"I can't tell you how happy I am to be back," Eckelberry said. "We are very relieved."

As the family set about unpacking and, later, removing sandbags and tape from around the doors, Eckelberry said he still thinks they made the right decision to evacuate Friday morning.

"This was a real danger," he said. "There was a real probability of a very bad storm. It was the prudent thing to do. But it is very hard to leave a place that is your home and you love being at."

Dolores and Kenneth Donovan, no relation to the beach Realtor, spent more than two days emptying the first floor of their two-story Island Estates home. Married for 53 years and Clearwater Beach residents since 1968, the couple considered their $500,000 boat a lost cause.

Watching and wondering was terrible, said Kenneth Donovan, a retired land speculator.

"It was the most miserable experience I ever went through," he said. "I'm so happy it's over."

Clearwater officials opened the Memorial Causeway bridge at 6:12 p.m. Friday, hours after everyone realized the hurricane had missed Pinellas County. Cars were already waiting when a city garbage truck pulled away.

"Somebody really looked out for us," said Jeff Garland, one of the first over the bridge. "We've had chills for the last three hours - literally."

Trish Muscarella headed back to her home on Clearwater Beach the moment she heard the mandatory evacuation had been lifted Friday evening.

"I wanted to beat the crowds," she said.

Like most of her neighbors, Muscarella had boarded up her home. She then loaded up her cat, Cici, and went to her father's house in Palm Harbor.

"Thank goodness," she said. "We got lucky this time. I think most people use common sense. Even though this one missed us, it would have been 100 mph-plus winds if it had hit us."

Raised in Clearwater Beach, she has lived through a few near misses.

"But until this time, I never heard the strain in people's voices like, "This is the one.' "