Spending Vacation Storm Free Is On My Wish List

I'll start off by mentioning that I hope you are safe from any high water resulting in Sunday's rain (July 11th.) I've seen many pictures and listened to the news from our WNBF news team to know that it was not a good night for those affected.

Some roads became impassable, damaged and closed due to the heavy rain we've been experiencing. I've seen pictures on social media from friends who have water in their basement. All too familiar scenes as we've witnessed time and time again.

The last major flood occurred in our area almost 10 years ago (2011) and just five years before that in 2006. Both of those summertime floods are ones we'd all like to forget. And both times, I was on vacation at camp. Everytime we get a big storm like we've experienced over the  past week, the fear comes back that we could get hit again.

I was on vacation last week, spending time at a campground in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, and I had a feeling Mother Nature was going to wallop us with nasty weather from the start.  As soon as we arrived at our camper, the skies opened up with heavy rain and hail like I"ve never seen. We sat in the van for almost 30 minutes waiting for at least the hail to end, so we could run from the van to the camper.

The ground around our camper was basically a swamp for a couple of days. Then on Wednesday, round two hit the Southern Tier of New York and Northeast Pennsylvania. The result was a lot of low lying area flooding in the communities around our campground and a lot of fallen limbs and trees. Some of those trees were very large, and it was astonishing to me how they had been pulled out of the ground from the strong winds.

I passed by several homes with trees resting on the roof along with wires down in several areas. Many lost power, although we were lucky at the campground to have power the entire time. Fortunately, all the trees around my camper held strong, but not all trees in camp survived the storm on Wednesday. The aftermath kept the grounds crew busy cutting up limbs and trees.

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On Friday, we were hit with another nasty storm and the winds were almost as bad as they were on Wednesday. Fortunately, I didn't see any damage from that storm except for low land flooding. Sunday, we buttoned up the camper to head home from vacation justy as the rain started to fall again. I can only hope my next vacation will be sunny and warm.