Where The Wind Takes Us... One Doggie Field After Another

First it was the flooding, then the record snow and freezing, now the record winds! Sea-Tac airport had a record 69mph gust, over a million people are without power, including us. But much to our surprise, our phone works, for now.

The night was exciting with the highwinds, torrential rain (over 2 inches). The power went out shortly after 8pm here.
Suzi has to work today. Our radio reception is not so hot, and since we had phone service, we checked the road conditions, figuring the buses would be late. It was amazing at how much of the traffic map was white, which means no information... aka, no power in this instance.
So we warmed out coffee on the cook top of our fireplace insert, and Suzi enjoyed what will probably be her last warm shower for awhile, since out hot water tank is electric.
We went out to the garage, loaded the pups up in the car for the ride to Seattle, and remembered, Garage door openers don't work when the power is out... We pulled the little rope for disengaging the opener, and could not get it pulled, I checked with the other door to see if we were doing it the right way, and yes, so I figured it was just an odd angle since we had to lean over the hood of the car... I ranked hard, and the door popped up! Didn't seem right the way it popped up, as a matter of fact, we could not get the door to close more than 1/2 way, so we put a screwdriver in the little hole on the side to keep it shut... one more thing to do...

The next thing that happened was we drove down the driveway to find a tree blocking our way. So we got out the chain saw (the electric one with our little Honda generator) Got our driveway cleared out.

At the end of the block, the sharp corner, we were greeted by a large down tree and power lines. So we turned around. We drove around the block, and got all the way to Florence Acres Rd... Towards Monroe there was a HUGE tree spanning the roadway, so we turned around. There was a car coming from Sultan, so we waited, as he approached the tree that blocked our way he slammed on his brakes, and skidded his tires. We were worried since it was 4:30am and very dark that he might not stop in time... Whew... he turned around and headed back to Sultan, so we followed him. It wasn't far and there was another tree over the roadway, but the power lines were holding the tree up, and he went under the tree. We like life too much to take such risks, and turned around. Here is a shot in the dark of the tree he drove under.



We went the other way to town, and made it just fine, you could see along the way were trees were attacked by chain saws to make the way clear, at least one lane... The roads from Monroe to Seattle were fine except for the no power to street lights backing things up, and the hwy 520 bridge was still closed...

I better go get my shower in before all hot water is lost. If we still have phone service, I will post some pics later.