This is Our Life!: A Pig Roast Thwarted by a Derecho

A pig roast thwarted by a... what? Yea, a type of storm that no one has ever heard of before. So here's what happened. A friend of ours named Emma has a Samoan brother-in-law. For a long time now she has talked about having him come up and doing an authentic Samoan pit barbecue pig roast. And it finally happened. And what's better, the pig roast was also to be a camping trip.

This was a pretty common sight all over the area after the storm

Overall, it seemed like an ordinary Friday night in the summer. It has been wicked hot, so Ryan and I decided we'd go up a little bit later. We figured dinner wouldn't be ready until 9 or so. So when we arrived at 8:30 and found out they were estimating it would be more like 11 when the pig would be sufficiently roasted, we knew it was time to head into town and pick up something quick to eat. We debated if we should set up our tent before going, or wait until we got back. It was sprinkling lightly, so we decided to let that finish and then we'd set it up after dinner. BEST decision ever. We found this hole in the wall Mexican restaurant, El Sloppy Tacos, (great name isn't it!) and ordered something to eat. As we ate, there was a tv on and it said a storm was moving our direction. We were debating whether is was anything to worry about since we hadn't heard anything previously, and decided we'd just wait and see if it was a big deal. Well, in the next 30 minutes or so, things got crazy. The wind picked up, a lot. And the rain began to pour. The lights flickered once, twice, and then they were gone. There were about 6 other people in the restaurant and one worker. She had one candle so we lit that and just hunkered down for the storm.

It was eerie as we stood in the doorway looking out on the street. There was a large old church at the top of the street on a hill. With every flash of lightning it was silhouetted against the sky. Stragglers wandered the streets in the rain. It would have been the perfect setting for a horror film. When the storm finally calmed enough that we could run to our car, we did, but still got soaked. We quickly agreed that we'd just go home that night, but we had some stuff in our car that the campers needed. We started down the road toward the campsite, but were soon impeded by a large downed limb. Although Ryan and some other guys were able to get that cleared fairly quickly, we soon learned there were several more along that road.

Needless to say, Ryan and I did not stay the night. We couldn't have gotten in if we had wanted to, not for at least several hours until someone brought a chainsaw. We drove home and carefully avoided the the tree limbs that littered the road. The damage was impressive, though we realized that even more when we got home. Our complex was eerily dark and as we came up to our front door, a small emergency box was making a creepy beeping noise ever 30 seconds or so. It was so Jurassic Park-like. All the power was out. To make a long story short, this storm quite handily knocked out the power for most of Northern Virginia for several days during a week of record high temps. While most were suffering the heat, we packed up and went to Ashburn for a couple days because Ryan's parents had power. Someone smart out there put all the power lines underground so the many trees of Virginia couldn't take out the power. Ryan and I both got Monday off work because the power still wasn't on at our workplaces, though it had come back on to our place by Sunday night. Here's some of the damage to our building: