Storm - Part III

PS We had to call in reinforcements to fix our road. Luckily, Nova Scotia is "improving" the highway to Peggy's Cove and were working just up the road from the camp. They came in and poured some sort of special gravel that packs down hard (not quite as hard as chip seal but same kind of idea), which will hopefully prevent future washouts of this nature.

Storm - Part II

The next morning Tim and I woke to the sound of our cell phone ringing, which can only be bad news that early in the day. Sure enough, it was the boys at the top of the hill calling to say that our road was washed out, and it was going to have to be fixed before the cooks could get in to prepare breakfast.

Tim, Matt, Griff, Ben, and Brad spent an hour fixing the road with a shovel and a broken wheelbarrow enough so that an emergency vehicle could get in if necessary, but despite their hard work, the road was still most definitely impassable for anything other than a 4 wheel drive.

This is what the road looked like after an hour of hard work. Before they began, Matt could lay down in one of the washouts in the fetal position and be completely hidden from view. While it's a little hard to tell, the hole that I'm standing in is almost halfway up my shin.

We received so much rain that night that it added about 3 inches of water to the pool in a period of 2 hours. To put that into perspective, it takes 4 hours for the pump to add the same amount of water to the pool each week.

As they day continued, we searched for evidence of lightening strikes around the camp. It split a tree behind cabins 4 and 5 and may have struck the ground in front of the lodge, but the earth shattering strike that woke us up the night before remained a mystery. Finally, as I was walking back to the cottage looking for evidence of the strike in nearby trees, I stumbled over a bit of ground that as far as I remembered had always been smooth before. I looked down at my feet and realize that I was standing in a perfectly charred out circle of mud - evidence of THE lightening strike.
A path of flattened grass led from the hole to the edge of the pool deck. Closer inspection of the pool area revealed not only melted and charred plastic along that section of the fence, but also a fresh crack running through the cement from one side of the pool deck to the other.

If you look closely, you can see a grayish coloured building with windows in the background. That's our cottage, which is about 50 feet from the pool. No wonder I thought the roof was going to fall in!

Storm of the Summer!

One night I woke up to a thunderstorm raging over the camp. I would doze as it moved back out over the ocean and would wake up as the ocean pushed it back up against the camp. The flashes of lightening coming through the bedroom window were almost continuous and the rolling thunder sounded like a constantly grumbling stomach.

Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder unlike I have ever heard in my entire life. I curled into a ball and covered my head with my arms against the debris that I was sure was about to rain down on my head. After remaining frozen in that position for what seemed like hours (in reality it was probably only about 1 minute), I gradually realized that our cabin was still intact. I began to the process of convincing by body that it was indeed safe to uncurl and quickly counted all of my fingers and toes. After ensuring that I, as well as our cabin was indeed intact, I looked at Tim (who was also wide-eyed and awake) and said, "You should probably go see what's on fire.” After a brief argument, we agreed to BOTH go see what building had exploded.

We crept out to the living room and peered through the mini blinds looking for that telltale orange glow. Much to our immediate surprise the shower building directly beside our cabin appeared to be completely intact, as did the lodge and all of the cabins at the top of the hill. While we couldn't see the boys' cabins behind our cottage, we decided that if one had been struck, the cabin leader from the other would have come to get us by then. Relieved that we were not going to have to call 911, we faced the inevitable fact that we were not going to bed any time in the near future! We pulled up the blinds and each wrapped in a blanket on our big comfy chairs to enjoy the show. Only once have I seen the lightening light up the sky as many times as it did that night, but then we watched from across the lake, not the middle of the storm.

As the lightening snaked down toward the camp, we speculated on which ones struck trees (or the ground) and which ones missed and tried to figure out where the lightening struck that so abruptly woke us up; if not the shower building, perhaps the pool again? We also watched a few brave souls make mad dashes to the bathroom through the torrential rain (ask Darrell about his adventure) and thanked God for the foresight of the board to include a bathroom inside our cottage.