Ice Storm: 10 Years

10 years ago we had a major ice storm. My Mom and I drove up from Virginia to northern New England to spend several days looking at houses. Because of the storm we decided to do all the houses in one day and literally drove the whole length of the state. That’s when we saw the house we are currently in. The ice storm hit and knocked out power to the majority of the state. I was supposed to meet up with a high school friend who was living in the area, but we had to cancel because of the storm. I never did get to see her and she no longer lives in this state.

The hotel we were staying at still had power and we tried to get another night there before heading home, but they wanted to price gouge the people in town with no power and so wouldn’t let us stay (we later filed an official complaint and the State fined them a lot of money.) We called some places on my cell phone and found a hotel with power in southern New England and so went there. It was a good thing we had just filled-up our gas the night before since all the gas stations we saw had no power and so no one could get any gas.

We knew we were lucky than most and so when we learned that my college friend and his wife had no power we drove an hour from the safety of our hotel to their house (having to go around icy roads, large fallen trees, closed roads,, etc.) At one point I had to go into a town’s police station and ask permission to drive through a closed road that they wouldn’t even go through since I didn’t know of another way. We even had one area where we had to drive partly on the road and partly in a swamp to get to them. It was not easy or fun, but they were able to come to our hotel and have power and hot food.  While at the hotel we were able to put an offer on the house we wanted and the realtor drove from her office to our hotel and we signed the paperwork. When things outside had improved some we left the hotel and headed back down to Virginia (dropping my friend and his wife at home along the way.)

It was that ice storm that brought us into our first real taste of a northern New England Winter. The house we had put an offer on and later bought was only set-up for 3 seasons and so we would have to winterize it. 

The picture above is one I took near my friends’ house when we picked them up.