Battle of the Road

 Yesterday afternoon we packed up the van for the first week of Good News Club in Orillia and drove off to meet Dwane (a retired CEF worker who still does lots of work with CEF). We planned to drive down to Orillia together (~45 min drive from where we meet.)

We knew it had been raining a lot and the snow has been melting, creating lots of water. The night before, our road had some water all the way across it so we weren't overly surprised to find the road completely flooded about 200 ft from our driveway. It wasn't that deep but spread much wider than we've ever seen it, but we were able to drive through it. Phew! We made it through the flooded spot on our road we thought...





until we saw cars stopped ahead of us on the road and orange cones pylons cones and orange sticks. We were running a couple minutes behind, so David jumped out to find out what was going on. Only to be told that the road had washed out (the only road going in and out to our house). We quickly turned around, went home, called Dwane who should have been gone already but Praise the Lord was just leaving. We drove back down to wait for Dwane to pick us up (he lives 15-20 min away)

 

Since we had some time we were able to investigate and take some pictures.

 Notice how it's all eroded away underneath the road. This part of the road is dirt. While we were standing there for 15 min. we saw pieces of it suddenly drop into the rushing stream. One chunk was a foot wide.

This is the other side -where the water was flowing, bringing lots of water to who knows where.

Thankfully, we were able to make it to Good News Club and 3 boys attended, with a potential for quite a few more kids in the upcoming 5 weeks. 2 of the boys were so excited to invite their friends they took all the invitations we had with us and were fighting over how many they each got to give out. =] We praise the Lord that the other volunteers made it and amazingly, somehow with all the delay we weren't technically late for the club.

When Dwane dropped us off it was pouring rain. The township had dumped a load of materials into the area but it had already flooded back over and washed out more of the section so that it was undriveable. 

It poured rain all night so David just went to check the road (because we have a bunch of appointments we're supposed to leave for in 2 hours in Bracebridge, Barrie and Orillia). However, the verdict from David was that we won't be going anywhere anytime soon. The water across the road by our house is now about 1 foot deep (possibly still passable)...but the other section is washed out and unpassable.Also, we're supposed to continue to get quite a bit more rain over the next few days.

Hmm...this could be a very interesting week!

P.S. Our phone isn't working either :)