Eventful June 2017!

What happened on the 7th of June 2017 is not the reason for me being such a poor blogger, the reason for blogging so sporadically is simply because I am not yet feeling settled in our new "place called home", even after 2 years!  Apparently I need to give myself 3 years!

Nevertheless, the 7th of June 2017 will be a day we here in Knysna will remember for all of our lives.  Literally Knysna, our town was on fire!  We have one main highway running through the town, is also acts as I main road, with a few roads leaving off each side.  I woke up that Wednesday morning, left home to take my daughter to school around 7am, felt that the "clouds" we were seeing looked ominous, like we were in the centre of something bad.  And we were.  A fire had started both to the left and to the right of our town.  Fires are common, but normally contained.

I don't really want to relive this whole experience, suffice it to say that we and thousands of others were evacuated (apparently 10 000 people were displaced).  In between all of that we had to get our dogs evacuated by boat across the lagoon.  My husband was out of town and was only arriving home that evening, but couldn't as the highway was closed.  Friends put us up in their home for just short of a week.

If you are one for details you may find these articles interesting:
- Article from an acquaintance Chris, who lost his home
-  5 Factors that caused the Perfect Inferno, excellent article
- Tally of Destruction

Some photos:

 Driving to school we saw this on our Left....

 Then we saw this on our Right

 Wednesday evening watching Brenton hill on fire, this is were our piece of land is and further to the right the house we just bought a month ago....

 Driving to Brenton on Thursday morning agains the police warnings that it was not safe, I just had to go and see if we still had a home.  The devastation that was left, like a moonscape, brought us all to tears.

 Our land, that's all that's left!  Very grateful that we had postponed the building of our home!

 Watching wide eyed as the fire is desperately trying to destroy our friends' family home.  I think it tried 3 times, and failed!

 Smoke absolutely everywhere!  We coughed for weeks!

 The street where we were renting a home just a month before was very badly affected!

 The fire returned to Brenton hill and once again we feared for our new home!

 Our new home, standing on the patio, the fire just stopped on the other side of the fence!

 The sand dunes were totally destroyed all the way from Brenton to Buffalo Bay!

This tree on our land says it all!

When I was looked for these photos for this blog post I had to quickly look at random photos taken in 2017 just to remind myself that it was all good before, and it will all be good again!

And now that this is out of the way I will attempt to post some Zentangle art that I have been  these last few days, but in a separate post.  In addition the outside cottage on the property we recently purchased has been renovated and I will soon be able to craft again and am hoping to get back to making cards and teaching Zentangle!

Thank you for bearing with me through this rather long post.