devastation

It's been a week since I've posted. That's because I'm lazy. Too lazy to walk. Too lazy to write about it.

Friday Pat and I did errands. We walked every aisle of the supermarket and a few more places. I was lazy enough to call it exercise. I was moving for at least 30 minutes.

Saturday I worked.

Sunday I was supposed to walk at the Thomas Darling Preserve with Get Out Lehigh Valley. It was raining and lightning and thundering when I was supposed to leave. The weather map said Blakslee was next. I wasn't driving an hour to walk in dangerous conditions. I might be dumb, but I'm not stupid.

Monday I was on deadline for a project. My friend Angel was admitted to St. Luke's for an infected cat bite -- cellulitis. She almost had to have hand surgery. Instead they put low-tech medicine to the test -- maceration dressing and IV antibiotics -- and it worked.

Tuesday was Tropical Storm Isasis. In the early hours of the storm, I  walked to the hospital and took her some clothes and things. It's funny seeing her wear my giant clothes. Coming home Broadway was a river as was Delaware. The streets were ghost towns, as they should be. Flooding was everywhere. I went back up there on Wednesday.

Today is Thursday and it was a day for my first real exercise. We cannot walk on the D&L because of the storm. They are still cleaning it up. There are some great pics on FB. We decided to walk at the game preserve. I know it now has a fancy new name "The Trexler Nature Preserve" but to me it will always be the game preserve. There are freaking buffalo and elk roaming the hills. If it bothers you, have the PC police shoot me.

We decided to do the Covered Bridge Trail because it was paved. Was is the key word in that sentence. When we arrived all the parking spaces said "handicapped"? Say what? Then Pam noticed some signs pointing up the road and there is now a large parking lot with a fresh trail going down to the covered bridge trail. It's so fresh that you sink into the stones.

We turned left on the trail and headed toward the bridge. The water in the creek was high and racing by. The weeds on either side of the path were flattened by the storm surge. And it was wide, all the way back to the tree line and a little further.

We crossed the bridge and returned the other side. This path took more of a hit than the first one. There were erosion ditches and areas down to the bare shale and limestone. Bridges were muddy. One trail crack coming down the hill looked like it was carved by an earthquake it was so deep.

The ford was impassible. The road was closed. Nobody could cross. You car would have been washed away. There was someone on the pedestrian bridge REPAIRING it. That's how high the water got. It spread to the hill going up to the zoo. We couldn't cross because workers with heavy machinery were working on the other side.

We continued straight. This section was paved. I think it was a road. It took us up a hill to the other covered bridge and the zoo. We walked three-quarters around the zoo and came back down to the ford. The man fixing the bridge said we could cross if we stayed in the middle. He wasn't done fixing the railings. The heavy machinery was gone.

The water had moved port-o-potties, trash cans, and picnic tables. They were at strange places and at odd angels. South of here they also had tornadoes with the storm. One lady on television said she watched things flying past her window. She wanted to put on ruby slippers and find Oz. I was thinking of her when I saw everything rearranged.

We had to use the rails going up to the pedestrian bridge. It was slick with an inch of mud. We crossed being careful of edges and his tool. The return path had already been repaired, but water had settled in pools on it. It was a muddy trek back to the car.

Miles/Steps:    3+

Weather:         81 at 8 am, high humidity, mostly sunny.
Wildlife:          besides a zoo full of creatures? A monarch butterfly and a gold finch. We also killed a gypsy moth.

PPE Found:     3 masks at the zoo. 

SLF:                Maybe the little suckers got washed away. It was interesting invasive species of trees were still standing while everything around it was flattened.

Extra:              Pam drove. We stopped at a farm market on the way home and then took some back roads to her house. One was closed because of water. The water was hourglass shaped. Wide at the sides, narrow at the yellow line. Coming our direction we had no warning until a "road closed" sign appeared. Pam asked if we should go thru. I told her that was her decision. She did, we ended up stalling at the edge of the puddle. Her husband laughed uncontrollably when called. But in five minutes the car worked and we were on our way.