Our late morning pedal before feasting on Thanksgiving goodies was a little different than we planned.
As we traversed the valley the Santa Ana winds really began to picked up. It was like pedaling with the brakes on. The wind was intense.
That’s when we saw the slight bit of smoke about a mile or 2 away. We stopped to feed the ducks at our favorite little pond but within minutes my watch and our phones alerted us to evacuate the area. FIRE! Now there was a lot of smoke. We need to leave.
If we can get South and East a bit we’ll be fine.
But Omg the wind! Normally we use just the little old and fading, original ELF batteries for this 12 mile pedal. But with the wind and some major pedaling we had to use both of our on board batteries to get home. Kevin could hear Lucky’s Mac motor grinding away as we pedaled against the wind.
As we pedaled home another alert came. The 40-50mph winds and a fire in a populated area can be the making of a disaster. The electric company had already cut power to the area earlier in the day as a precaution, to avoid Downed power lines. There were so many homes in San Diego county that had no power this Thanksgiving Day.
SoCal has some of the best firefighters around. CalFire and the fire dept threw everything they had at it. Within minutes there were Helicopter water drops, airplane retardant drops and ground crews.
It was hard to believe that no homes were damaged and within just a couple of hours they were mopping up.
Now safe at home and away from the fire it was time to chill and enjoy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
