Through the Storm

This past weekend, I took Thursday and Friday off and went up to the cottage with my mom and sister.  My dad, Ryan and my brother were going to join us after work on Friday.  This weekend post is actually going to be a two-parter because Friday was pretty eventful.

Everything started out well.  They were calling for thunderstorms, but it was a nice morning.  The heat wave hadn't broken yet, so it was about 40 degrees and the wind was actually kind of nice.  I had invite my friends Adam and Meaghan up for the day with their baby.  My cousin Ryley and his girlfriend had also come for the day.

We did know that there was a tornado watch, so it was something that we were aware of, but so far the sky was blue.

Then everything changed.  The sky started to get dark so we cleaned everything up and moved up to the deck, underneath the awning.  It wasn't raining yet, but we were sure that the rain was imminent.

Then it just started pouring.  The wind was blowing, so Tali and I ran out to try to deflate our eight person lounge before we went inside.  We were all sitting around inside, enjoying some wine, talking about what game we should play if we were stuck inside for the rest of the afternoon.

I'm not sure what changed and what made us think that we needed to be a bit safer than we were while we were sitting in a living room with a full glass wall.  My mom was napping so we went in and told her that we were going to the crawlspace.  She took us seriously because that's not something that we usually do.  I closed a bedroom window and noticed that a tree was already down in the driveway. 

The cottage doesn't have a basement, just a crawlspace.  I have never actually been in the crawlspace before.  Until now that is.  We thought that it's better to be safe than sorry, so up the floor came and in a few of us went.  It ended up that only Meaghan, Tali, myself and the baby were down there.  I'm not too sure what everyone else was doing, watching the show I guess.  They saw the floating dock fly up and barrels come flying towards the cottage.  They saw a tree fall in the front yard.  We were just down in the crawlspace making sure that we had room for everyone.

 

Crawling out of the crawlspace

Eventually the storm stopped and we went outside to this.

 

Trying to collect the missing barrels

The broken dock

The neighbour's Willow tree, which took out about 5 of our trees

The driveway - It's going to be tricky for our guests to leave!

 

Luckily, we have a friend who's parents live on the lake.  Her dad came over with his tractor and chainsaw to help remove the tree from the driveway so that people could leave.  We were also so lucky that we had invited people up for the day.  It would have been a pretty scary situation (well scarier than it actually was) if it had of just been us three girls.

 

 

The girls even helped

 

I made it through the Tornado Mom!

So yes, Friday was eventful.  Luckily nobody was hurt.  Our cottage and the one next to us seemed to have the worst of it.  As far as we know, there wasn't an actual tornado, just a lot of wind.  But it sure did create a pretty big mess to be cleaned up.  Our poor cottage guests will probably never come back....But I'm still pretty glad that they were there and that we weren't alone.