Loro Ciufenna

We are presently in Italy enjoying a villa in Tuscany with friends from New Jersey. Spent an earlier 12 days or so in Portugal (Lisbon and Lagos areas) with other good friends from Australia. Will be home again soon and plan to share lots of photos and stories then. Meanwhile, here is one view from the charming little town of Loro Ciufenna which is very close to our villa.

Installment Two

Those of you who keep up with Kathie on Facebook will already know about this event. However, since this blog is as much a journal for us as it is a way to share with you faithful readers, I'm going to post the information here as well.

It seems that the storm damage we suffered last June (click here for a refresher) was only installment one by Mother Nature. I got a call yesterday afternoon from our neighbors up at the lake saying that another severe storm, evidently much worse than the last one, had rumbled through our area two nights ago. They said that there were many, many trees down throughout the region, including twenty or more over the road leading back to our property. There are also many down on our property, including the three large red pines that you may remember being near our parking area, just at the top of the rise near the septic field. They fell toward the lake, and as a result, aimed right toward the porch and hot tub area of our cabin. The neighbors sent pictures last evening, all of which I post below.

Evidently, the garages are intact, as is the main body of the cabin. The screened-in porch looks like it sustained most of the damage, and maybe not as horrible as I imagined from the phone call. Hard to tell if there is any damage to the hot tub, but I'm sure the deck railings were crushed. Sadly, one of the two flowering trees we planted in memory of Kathie's mother's passing was right in the line of one of the fallen pieces. So, I'll want to replace that. We don't know what things look like in the woods on our property near the road. If this keeps up, we won't have to worry any longer about trees falling.

We are about to head to Europe for a month, so the timing on this isn't great. We'll be back up there around the middle of October, and so I guess there will be cleanup and repair to get done. An insurance adjuster has been called, so that work can begin while we are away at least. I won't have more details to share until we can be up there to take a look. Naturally, I've been kicking myself overnight, because when the June damage occurred and we scheduled cleanup of that mess, I seriously considered having these three big red pines removed, since I have always feared what would happen if they came down. Now I wish I had followed through on that. Oh well!