major storms, flooding and general mayhem!

We have just come out the other side of 4 days of complete chaos as regards the weather. Northland does get wet and we have a lot of flooding, but usually the severest of weather is over in a day, so it's not a long term thing. But this time we had around 4 days of the worst weather we have ever had in the 10 years we've lived here. In the two main days of rain almost half a metre fell - yep - over our wee area we had 450mm of rain. This is off the scale! The was paired with hurricane force gusts of wind. Lloyd seriously thought all the windows in our wee cottage were going to blow in at one point.

This is what we've just been through. If you can see the outline of NZ's north island we are in the reddest bit with the lines almost touching!

Now that it's over and we have wandered around it's amazing how little damage we've suffered. There are a few trees down and absolutely everything is waterlogged. The driveway down to The Acorn is trashed, there's mud everywhere, and we had no power for all of 6 hours, but it's tiny in comparison to what others are going through. Some were without power for 3 days, lots have been evacuated from their homes because of flooding. Roads have literally disappeared because of landslips. State Highway 1, pretty much our only way south had large areas of it underwater. It will be ages until it's repaired.

The weather is an amazing thing.

During the storm - this was how we roll during a power cut! If the electricity does go off we have no water either as it's all done by a pump.

Lloyd cooking dinner with a headtorch on! Over our wood range.

Our ponytail palm lost his head!

Trees down all over the place!

 I took these yesterday, once the rain had stopped,  on our drive from home into Kerikeri. It was early morning and the mist was just burning off, it turned into a beautiful day. ( there is a difference between iphone pics and good camera pics!!)

All the reflections are in flood water. There are farms underneath.

We had to drive through this to get into town, but we had the trusty old jeep.

We saw the farmer inspecting this, and he waved and smiled - still smiling!

Now, I didn't take the following photos and it's proving impossible for me to find who did to credit them, but here are some photos of what it looks like. It should also be pointed out that these roads aren't back roads - this is State Highway 1! Our main road to basically anywhere!

The emergency services, electricity linesmen/women, ordinary folk...pretty much everyone has been amazing. Let the clean up begin!