Snowmaggedon 2022!

Okay, so our New Year started auspiciously, with a win by the Philadelphia Eagles over the Washington Football Team yesterday, Sunday, January 2.  Our son Matt invited us to attend with him and our grandson William and William's Cub Scout Pack.  We were sorry our daughter Katie couldn't attend, because she loves the Eagles and enjoyed the game on TV.  Katie and Matt mitigated the situation by maintaining a stream-of-text through the game.

The whole group tailgated together and spent a convivial hour or so before the game.  During the game, we all sat together, but, at least for the early part of the game, there was space between Covid pods.  We noticed that the Eagles fans were not too obnoxious, and that the Washington fans were gracious in defeat.  It all came down to one play in the last 30 seconds, which was very exciting.

Here we are trying to be Covid-safe:

Our reward for joining our son and grandson at a football game was a home-cooked Chinese meal skillfully prepared by our daughter-in-law Weina.  We drove home to our campground with our tummies and hearts full.  However, we had learned from the weather forecast that a huge snowstorm was bearing down on us.  We got home to our campground in Spotsylvania, Virginia in time to tuck into bed and wait to wake to see what the weather was bringing us.

We woke to Snowmaggedon 2022:

Snow was due to accumulate from 8am until 2pm, so at 10:30 am David ventured out to do a half-way shoveling of our site and the RV roof.  Here he is as he dares to confront the dragon of Snowmaggedon:

After our first shoveling, which was tough due to the heavy, wet snow, we waited for the snow to stop, which it did around 2:00 pm.  Kathy took a ruler out to measure the accumulation.  It said over 10 inches!  When taken into account with the fact that early snow had likely melted and decreased the snow level, we guessed that the snow accumulation was somewhere between 10 and 12 inches.

On the positive side, our campground pond looked like a picture from Currier & Ives:

More sobering, the snow was weighing down the campground trees, and every 5 or 10 minutes we would hear the crack or boom of another tree falling from the weight of the heavy snow:

Only a couple weeks ago, our grandson William, had explored this playground.  Now, it looked like a scene from "Christmas Chronicles":

We shoveled out a second time, and then ventured out for a campground walk.  Innumerable trees had fallen over the campground road and over the power lines supplying our campsites with power.  Campground workers informed us that it would be days before we could expect power to return.

We checked our propane levels, as well as the gasoline available for our generator, and concluded that we should be able to last a few days until power is restored.  We think we will try to wait out the power loss and boondock here until later in the week.  We'll keep you posted on the outcome.