BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Texas—She’s made the trek hundreds of times before, but when Carole Hamadey returned to the Bolivar Peninsula Monday, it was completely unfamiliar.

“It’s overwhelming. It just tears your heart out,” she said.

Hamadey has not been home since just after the storm hit.

She was greeted by the walking wounded in a scarred battlefield that used to be her neighborhood.

Neighbors hugged neighbors, grieving for what they lost.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Oh, it’s all gone,” Hamadey said.

Hamadey rode out the storm at her bed and breakfast with her friend, Diane Alexander.

“We would have evacuated, but they didn’t take dogs,” Alexander said.

So the two women and their two dogs stayed, caught in the fury of Hurricane Ike.

At the height of the storm, her bed and breakfast, The Little Inn Out by the Sea, was in the middle of it.

“It’s like we were in the middle of the ocean. And we were in a whirlpool. It was going round and round and round about us,” Hamadey said.

As waves pounded at the window, Hamadey and her friend stood for hours trying to hold it in place.

“I knew that any minute we wouldn’t be able to hold it anymore and we’d go out with the wave. The worst part wasn’t when the wave went in, the worst part was when the wave went out. It would suck,” she said.

When Ike finally passed, Hamadey emerged to find herself in a sea of devastation. But remarkably, her bed and breakfast was largely intact. 

Alexander wasn’t so fortunate.

As she helped Hamadey hold her home together, Alexander’s home was ripped apart and wiped off the face of the Earth.

“I just want to go home, but can’t, you know that feeling? I just want to go home. Some people can,” she said.

So many others can’t.  If home is where the heart is, Diane Alexander’s heart is truly broken.