Life takes some funny turns sometimes, doesn't it.
10 days to go before our big trip to the UK - getting organised, studying the birds, finishing the painting, getting the place looking gorgeous, etc, etc and then - - - - -along comes a late season cyclone called 'Ita'.
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| Red Mill House before |
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| Red Mill House after |
Ita crossed the coast near Cooktown at about 9pm on Friday
and headed pretty-well slightly inland and parallel from there. It started
blowing here at about midday that day and continued, culminating in us being
slammed at between about 3 and 7am in what was, I think, a Cat 3 still at that
stage.
She raced up the Daintree Valley from all directions but
chose a swathe of about 200m wide at this point - -our 200m! You can see
the strip for miles.
We had trees and branches crashing down all over the place,
bouncing off the roof and in some cases piercing the roof.
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| Front garden before |
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| Front garden after |
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| Our bedroom roof |
In all we lost eight of our biggest trees and picked up three from our neighbours – they fell in three different directions in the space of minutes. Fortunately our great big milky pine out in the front yard chose just to shed all her branches rather than topple over – we are extremely grateful for that! She would have flattened the house if she’d gone down. Pretty scary though as she threw them down at us.
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| Poor old pool fence |
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| The pool |
We are fine, the buildings are basically fine, and one day
the garden will look good again. Unfortunately the top come out of the big
Syzygium out the front, rending it dangerous, so it had to go - - -
I can’t believe that our tallest trees out the front are now
coconuts – horrible!
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| Three trees on top of each other |
The joy of living in the tropics is that everyone grows so
quick.
We have been blessed to have good people nearby to help out
and a tree-lopper and builder who are available.
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| Our new building 'the doghouse'' |
We've worked our butts off to clean up and things are looking much better - - all the other things will just have to remain undone.
