Saturday, April 16, started out with an Earth Day celebration.  Andy and I along with a few friends cleaned up a very small and particularly dirty part of the Raleigh Greenway.  We managed to fill up at least a dozen heavy duty garbage bags full of trash.  We did something.  Too bad that afternoon destruction swept through Raleigh.

Andy and I did some yard work over at our new house after the cleanup.   When the skies started getting darker and the winds started picking up we were ready to go home.  We packed up and went back to Blount St. where we sat on the porch to watch an exciting storm come in.  The winds started picking up, the sky turned green and the rain started falling sideways and hard.  Andy went to turn off the computer when we started hearing transistors pop and loud noises around us.  I started backing up towards the basement when I couldn’t see the front yard.  Soon after it started, the skies went from green to blue and the rain went from heavy to nothing.  A friend of mine called me who was out of town to see if I could check on her house.  I realized I might need to check on Camden while I was out.  When I got closer to Moore Square, I noticed trees down everywhere.  When I saw the roads were all blocked with downed trees, I went to pick Andy up to see the house with me.  We had to park in front of the trees in the road and step over them to even get to our house.  We didn’t know what to expect and all we could see were trees in the road and on some houses.  Luckily, our house was fine with only one small tree on the roof.  Robbie helped us get that down today.  Unfortunately, the house next to us was destroyed under the weight of several trees large and small.  They barely missed our house.

Here are pictures of the cleanup (before and after) and pictures of the walk to our house and some of the damage to the neighbor’s house.

Getting pretty frustrated it is taking Progress Energy so long to turn power back on at Camden but it is hard to complain when we have had no electricity in the house recently,  or any of the previous 18 months for that matter.  Just kidding.  We got lucky with two broken windows, about a dozen missing shingles, and a small dent in the roof.