We interrupt our regular scheduled blog post with breaking news. Breaking. Literally. On Saturday night, after watching some of the Winter Olympics we retired for the evening. At approximately 10:30 pm the cell phone rang. It was our neighbor Candy informing us that disaster had struck our home in Washington state. A tree had fallen onto our property. Honestly, this did come as a huge shock to us, although it shouldn't have. We live in a forest. Trees fall every winter, and every winter some unfortunate souls have to deal with the aftermath. We spoke with nearly all our neighbors that awful night, with each of them trying to describe what they saw. It all sounded pretty bad.... and it was. The next morning we saw with our own eyes just HOW bad. Sometimes pictures really do "speak a thousand words".
This huge tree, according to our neighbors, fell from across the street (from the forest) and apparently was/is rotten in places. The portion that hit our home is just the TOP part of the tree. There is a 80+ foot portion of this tree still remaining in the ground. I get the feeling that the part that hit our home broke off - possibly from the section shown here.
This shot shows our neighbor Paul giving some perspective as to how huge the remaining trunk of the tree is.
This next photo made me want to cry. Our lovely little home, so violated. :(
A front view of the damage.
This angle shows some of the roof damage.
Enough whining... or as the Brits say, "whingeing". This could have been SO much worse. If our car or our motor home would have been in the driveway, well, it would be ruined. Thankfully, no PEOPLE (or pets!) were near when the unfortunate impact occurred. The damage itself could have been SO much worse. Yes, we'll need repair and re-roofing done, but that's why we have insurance and have paid our premiums for years with nary a claim, till now.
On another note, we really want to thank our wonderful, thoughtful, caring, concerned, and helpful neighbors. Without them, facing this disaster would be SO much more difficult. We love you all!
One last pic.... to show there can be humor, even in the face of disaster....
Gotta love that wild, crazed deer, who seems quite shocked at the "carnage"! Yep, it was photo shopped in by our neighbor Brian, who has a knack of making the awful, a little bit less so.
We now will resume our regularly scheduled RV travel blog, with a plan to follow up from time to time with updates in the tree removal and repair process as it happens. It's so awesome that our insurance company already has a guy/crew working on it today, as (no shock) a lot more rain is expected in our neck of the woods in Washington.
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