When I went home a while back I stopped by my friends Adrienne and Ryan’s house. The kids played in the backyard some and I noticed their trampoline was tied down. I asked Ryan if it had flipped before. He said he had tied theirs down when they first got it and thought it was a good idea. He said he had seen it get picked up a little from a strong gust of wind. I wondered if we needed to tie ours down. We never had a problem. I never noticed it looking like it might blow over in the months we had it up. We had had some pretty windy weather. When I got home I mentioned it to John. He thought about it also and thought it was fine. We thought it was protected up against the fence and we had never noticed anything before, so it must be fine.
Yeah, we were wrong! The night of May 29th, we had a thunderstorm with strong winds, nothing out of the ordinary, we thought. The next morning I’m in the kitchen getting John’s lunch ready, helping kids with breakfast and John opens the blinds. He asks “Where’s the trampoline?” Ha-ha very funny I thought, then it occurs to me, could it have blown away? We went out on the deck and found it two doors down in the neighbors backyard. If you look at the pictures I took they are like a “Where’s Waldo” picture. It’s back there!
While John was at work, I walked over to see what had happened. It looked like it flipped over our fence landed in the field once, then flipped one more time and landed for the last time. There was debris left from our fence to where it stopped.
The wind must have been pretty crazy that night because the neighbors across the street had their trampoline blow away too. The crazy part was that it was blown in the opposite direction ours was! We are still trying to put it back together. The bottom frame was bent a little so John had to put screws where each part meets. The frame for the safety net had some bent poles, so we are looking for what options we have. We hope to find someone getting rid of a trampoline that has the parts we need to fix ours.
We found some stakes from our gazebo that we lost last year, yes the wind took that one too. Once we get the trampoline put back together we will be using them to tie it down. Lesson learned! Mother Nature wins round one! Or is it two?!