a not so welcome surprise

The day before we left the cabin (so last Monday) we got a call from my MIL informing us that there had been some bad storms in the Twin Cities and that we should have someone check on our house. Naturally this came as a huge surprise- the weather had been fine where we were, and not having any TV, internet, or phone, we had literally no idea that there were severe storms down south. Luckily we had been having someone check in on the house, but we had not heard from them (probably because of the lack of cell reception) with a report on our property. My mind immediately went to our power lines which run through our, and our neighbor's trees.

A few hours later we got in touch with our house-sitter and found out our fence was blown in, and thankfully nothing else. We got home to inspect the damage to find out it really wasn't that bad- in fact the fence was already propped up like this when we arrived on Tuesday, from the street you could not even tell anything was wrong (except that now our gate won't close).

Just one post had snapped and will need to be replaced:

And we lost a few relatively small branches:

All in all, we felt very lucky, especially after driving around the neighborhood and seeing this within blocks of our house:

The city of Minneapolis is even saying that the number of downed trees from this storm will likely surpass the number- 3,200 on public property and boulevards alone- destroyed by the Tornado that went through North Minneapolis two years ago.

And the clean-up isn't even close to done. As late as yesterday, as I drove back from work and Target Field I passed roads still completely closed off by downed trees and power lines.