Ice Storm

On Thursday night the ice storm hit. Hard. We were up all night listening to limbs and trees crash down in the woods next to the house. The house itself is fine, some debris, but nothing too bad. But, of course, along with the rest of the state, and most of New England, we were without power. It took about an hour to figure out that school was closed (no phones, no internet, no tv). Once we realized how widespread the damage was we went on a hunt for a place that would be open for breakfast. As it turned out, there was once pocket with power near Portsmouth, so along with half of Southern New Hampshire, we headed out there with the Wheelers (blog link on the right). We ended up in Barnes and Noble for most of the morning just enjoying the warmth and the light. Then, Brian and I headed out to Western MA to spend the weekend with his parents. We decided to drive through southern New Hampshire rather than through MA to get there because it's usually faster (again, without power there was no way to tell how bad things really were). It was insane. We drove over more than a dozen downed lines, and we had to drive under about seven more dangling over the road. Most of the 2 1/2 hour route was just one lane cut through debris, trees, branches, power lines, most still in the road with just a small section cut out for one car to get through. And those were the roads that were open. Whole sections of 101 were closed, and that's a main road.

Western MA was fine where we were and we had a nice visit with the family. We stayed for an extra day because there was no school today (or, as it turns out, tomorrow either). When we came back, we took the Massachusetts route. I'm sure the other one is still mostly impassable, with 200,000 homes to restore power to the streets aren't a huge priority.

We're home, with power. Some friends aren't so lucky and they may be without power for a while. We don't have phone service, but that's just fine, at least we have heat and lights.