The first alarm sounded at 1:20am with a piercing shriek, causing me to fly out of bed, heart pounding. I looked out in the hall and saw several other faces peering out in confusion. Figuring it was some prankster I was about to climb back in bed when the second ear splitting shriek sounded. OK, enough is enough. I looked out again and there were even more faces peering out. Only now I could smell smoke. I heard someone say something about the ice machine so I walked down the hall to investigate. The ice machine was fine but there was smoke pouring out of door marked laundry chute. Time to take this one seriously so, I hustled back to my room and like a good photographer grabbed my camera back and my computer and made my way down the three flights of stairs to the street. By now there were fire trucks pulling in (7 in all showed up) and a crowd gathering. McAllen’s finest took control and found the source of the fire…an electrical short and got to work. At 3:30am they had it under control and the smoke semi-blown out so we could return to our rooms. I crawled into bed knowing that darn alarm was going to wake me in an hour to start another day in my So Texas Photo Safari. Life is never a dull moment!

Images captured on Nikon D3, AF-S 24-70mm 2.8 on Lexar Digital Media