‘We never thought we’d be ... refugees’

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Ron Gardner, 52, a director of programming for Boeing, was camped out with his wife, two sons, a daughter, an Australian shepherd and two cats in the parking lot of Qualcomm Stadium. With lawn chairs and blankets, the grouping looked like a tailgate party before a football game.

‘I have what’s the most important to me: my family,’ said Gardner, who fled his home in Rancho Penasquitos. ‘When we left, it was so smoky you couldn’t see the sun. It was just an orange blob in the sky.’

Kay Nash, 88, a retired professor, lives in a retirement community in Rancho Bernardo. ‘I didn’t even get time to comb my hair or eat my breakfast. I just got my bird, his food and my medicine and drove off.’

She was philosophic. ‘I had too much junk anyway.... What will be, will be.’

Joe Livo, retired, left his Rancho Bernardo home. ‘In all our wildest dreams, we never thought we’d be in a line of refugees,’ he said.

-- Alex Pham