May 15, 2014

Cyclone Lusi

Well Mother Nature is sure making sure that my time in New Zealand is interesting. I experienced my first earthquake in Palmerston North and the second weekend I was in Whangarei I got to see what a southern hemisphere cyclone is all about. I had looked up cyclones and learned that hurricanes are called cyclones when they are in the southern hemisphere. They were saying that while cyclones usually downgrade a lot before hitting New Zealand that this would likely still be a cyclone. All I had to go off was what I had seen on TV so I emailed the family and asked what they wanted me to do to prepare. But they didn't seem too worried about it. My dad had even asked if I needed to board up windows! So... since I really didn't want to explain to the people I was housesitting for that all of their lawn furniture and stuff blew away while I was there, I spent most of Friday morning putting anything I thought might blow or break if it fell away. Just in Case!


 
The view from the front deck was sort of how I gaged how bad the wind and rain were getting. This was the start.

 
The neighbors wanted to go see it moving in on the coast so I went with them. The view was pretty impressive!
 
 
 
But it got a little scary when we got up to Ocean Beach.
 
 
 
We headed home and got there just in time to watch it really move in.

 
 

Someone was really not that impressed that the storm was messing with his deck time.

 
The view during the day wasn't too bad, but overnight on Saturday the wind was pretty intense. I kept listening to the trees getting blown around waiting for a big CRACK!



 
 Luckily nothing big was blown away, no big limbs came down and only a couple plants were broken. It ended up not being near as bad as they said it would be. I think that the family got a kick out of me moving all of the yard stuff, they said they had never done that before! It certainly explains the funny look I got from the other neighbor when he stopped by!
 

 

 

 

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