i survived...

I Survived: Priest Lake edition

{you know that show....I Survived...on TLC..or something?...anyway...i watch it all the time...and i felt like it was an appropriate title}.

so this year at priest lake was...rather interesting and somewhat dangerous.

prepare yourself cause this post might be a bit lengthy. but this is basically my journal so i want to make sure to include the awesome details. :)

every year since my mom {who is now 55?ish?} was 8 years old our family has been going to Priest Lake, Idaho for our annual camping trip. and it is always rather epic because it is so gosh darn fun.

this year was rather epic for a few other reasons...

it started out very nicely:

these were all taken thursday evening {which is the day we got there} and friday morning...

thursday was excellent...we went boating...ate and went to bed.

then friday..we went fishing off the dock and decided it was hot enough to get in our swimming suits.

the silly picture of my husband above is us packin up to go back up to camp because we saw a huge strom rolling in.....

we didn't know how huge til later.

norman and i were in our tent gettin ready to change from our swimming suits to our clothes and we hear this dog fight break out and people yelling. this dog had broken off his harness and attacked another dog and had a death grip on the dogs throat.

it was an awful scene and an awful noise coming from the poor dog being attacked.

finally, the owners got the dogs apart and we all went on our way...a little shaken. {especially me, because i just love dogs so much and we all literally thought the dog was going to kill the other...made my sick}.

about 5 minutes after that happened the storm hit....{makes sense right?} we were still in our tent finally getting changed and our tent litearlly started to blow away. with us in it. it was nuts. and pouring rain. felt like God was holding a bucket and dumped it on priest lake....

we stepped out of our tent and thats when i knew it was serious...and possibly life threatening.

i saw a tree starting to fall on my cousins trailer...i told them it was going to come down and soon and they all were yelling at everyone to get out of the trailer.

my cousin had her new born baby and needed to get away from the trees {basically impossible to do in the middle of the mountains}.

so mekelle {my cousin}, her baby, and her husband hopped in their car to head up to the camp store where there is a parking lot that is more open.

as all this is happening...i'm standing there...in the pouring rain..watching for trees to fall.

i felt like i was in the movie heidi.

{someone better know what i'm talking about}

my sweet husband who was already busy finding a way to help saw me standing there and wanted me out of here as well {trees were continuing to fall around us}. so he ran over to my cousins car that was stopped because of a tree that had fallen and asked if i could come with them. so i did.

we sat in the parking lot praying that none of our family was hurt and waiting for them to come up with us til the storm was over.

short anecdote:

nick {mekelle's husband who was driving} decided to leave us to go help my cousin and her husband get her boat out of the water...so i hopped in the front seat and we sat together and drove around the lot to find our family.

well as we were in the parking lot everyone started yelling that we needed to clear out the parking lot because life flight needed to land there. someone was hurt. and badly :(

i go to start the car.....it doesn't start.....crap...

battery is dead. i didn't know nick had the headlights on.

talk about embarrassing.

luckily we weren't the only ones who couldn't move. some other vehicles were stuck, too for one reason or the other.

as we were jump starting the car the helicopter is literally circling around us....i felt awful.

life flight decided they needed to land somewhere else. so they left. and we felt real dumb.

so anyway....the strom stopped and luckily everyone in our family was safe. and so was everyone in our campground. it was honestly a miracle.

unfortunately a man at a cabin nearby was in his truck and a tree fell on him and killed him :(

3 others were also seriously injured from the same cabin area.

so sad.

we walked around after the strom passed and the destruction was awful. it was so surprising no one got hurt.

here are some pictures:

this tree fell on my cousins tent...luckily they weren't in it.

this tree snapped in half and destroyed the volleyball net. the tree was about 3 ft in diameter

these are the roots of the tree that fell on the trailer i was talking about

luckily didn't do much damage.

used to be a campsite...

so...yeah....second day there and this is what happened. pretty crazy.

i was really impressed with the rangers though. they came in and cleaned right up. by the time we left the following friday it looked like it used to pretty much.

not only was i impressed with the rangers but i was so impressed with the men in the whole campground. you could just see all of them goin to work helping to get their wives, children, sisters, brothers, to safety and clearing out huge trees with chainsaws to do so in the middle of this huge storm.
it was so sweet to me to see everyone step up.

the strom also took out our power so we had to shower in the lake...that was cold. and it also made it so none of those cooking could cook what they were going to for dinner that night.

however my moms sweet cousins stepped up and fed us all:

yummy milk can dinner. :)

after that....the priest lake plague began.....

one by one everyone started getting sick. the violent kind of throwing up sick....

if i'm remembering correctly, it got 12 people in our family.....
my immune system must rock though cause my husband got it and i still slept in the same bed as him and what not and i never got it. :) {thanks mom for letting me eat dirt as a child}.

so besides those 2 things....this trip was great! :)

here are some pics from the rest of it:

i caught my first fishy! ...and norman...oops

out for dinner at cavanaugh's

baby zane

when i got home the girlies missed me so bad....the next morning they woke me up to snuggle a bit :) so cute.

 and that is the end of our epic tale.

hope you enjoyed! :)