Storms back home (West Coast Van Trip – Post 11)

Since we were in California, we decided to tack on a work week for John before heading home. He can only get about half his work done from home, the other half needs to be done onsite. He can do his onsite work in either Albuquerque or Livermore, which is the far east edge of the Bay Area. We decided it made sense for him to work a week in Livermore, because then we could go back to Tucson rather than all the way to Albuquerque. After two weeks of vacation, he needed to get caught up with his onsite work.

On our second morning in Livermore, I got text messages with alarming photos from my gardener and from my neighbor. Uh-oh. There had been a big storm in Tucson.

Our gardener started working on clean-up right away. He assured me the branches had not hit our pickup truck or our roof.

The backyard was even worse.

In the backyard we had a big section of tree down on our fence.

The fence was still standing (there is a good strong fence on the other side of that bamboo screening). So no major harm done, just clean-up to do.

We’re realizing we’re going to need to take out that huge tree in the front. It’s brittle, one of the two major trunks is splitting down the middle, and the other major trunk leans dangerously over the house.

It’s a huge tree; it’ll be a couple thousand dollars to remove. I have no idea when we’re going to be able to get someone out to do it – everyone is going to be booked for months because now there’s trees down all through Tucson. We’re getting record monsoon rains. I hope it hangs on until we can get it taken down. It’s a beautiful tree and we got it trimmed up last year in hopes of saving it, but we can’t have that enormous tree coming down on the house.

I was having a fun time in Livermore with a good friend of mine (I’ll write about those adventures in my next post), and John was getting a lot of needed work done. But we were also starting to feel like maybe it was time to get home!

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