The largest earthquake I've ever been in

One of the side jobs I did as a teenager was babysitting.  Being the oldest out of my siblings this came naturally to me and was an easy way for me to make money.  I babysat for clients' children of my dad's, friends' kids of my mum's, I even watched pets.  It was in October of 1999 when I was babysitting my mum's friends' children.  It was an overnight babysitting job, so I was required to spend the night and make sure the children ate dinner, had their playtime monitored, went to bed on time, etc.  The night had gone by smoothly and the kids were sound asleep, so I was able to go to bed myself.  It was at 2:46 am when I was woken up by violent shaking.  Growing up in Southern California I had been in plenty of earthquakes before, and it was a normal part of life for me.  We even had earthquake drills in school.  This earthquake was immediately different because I could tell by the strength and length of the shaking, that it was going to be a bad one.  I jumped up out of bed and ran and got the children and took them outside into an open space.  Depending on where you are when an earthquake hits, you're supposed to either go under a sturdy table, doorway, or if you can, get into an open space where nothing can fall on you.  Luckily, we were in the desert, so I was able to get us all in an open space easily.  Probably the scariest part of being in an earthquake is you never know if it's going to be bigger with the next aftershock, or if that's the biggest it's going to get.  But most earthquakes have foreshocks and aftershocks.  The shaking starts a little at first and then increases quickly.  It was the biggest earthquake I'd ever experienced, and it was even scarier because I was babysitting children.  One of the children was throwing up from motion sickness because the ground was shaking so violently.  All I could do was comfort them and pray that the shaking would end soon.  Later after the chaos of the earthquake, I learned that we had been in a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, which is massive according to the Richter scale.  We had just survived a major earthquake.  The earthquake did damage some highway bridges and derail a train, but we were very lucky it wasn't worse than that since its epicenter was in a remote part of the Mojave Desert.  If the epicenter had been in a major city or by the ocean, it could have been devastating.  One thing I don't miss about living in California is waiting for the next big earthquake to strike without warning.