So, 7 friends and I went there for my bachelor party, got there Thursday late at night and was going to stay til Sunday. We rented a REALLY nice house on Upper Corners Road, right near the southern trails.
We never did the southern trails before, and I have to say, they are a lot of fun, I have no idea why they don't get more mention when people talk about Raystown.
Anywhos, we rode 16 miles yesterday, and it was fun as expected, even though my friend taco'd his front wheel halfway thru Ray's Revenge. We stood on it until it was sorta straight, and removed the brake disc, and he actually was able to ride it all the way out and back to the house!
When we came back, we were having dinner and relaxing on the back deck, which had a fireplace.
The fireplace was directly on the opposite wall from my headboard of my bed in the master bedroom. This is where things started to suck.
Around 4am I smell smoke, and assume that the fire was still smouldering, since it was so close to me. Went out and looked and it was not. My friend woke up when he heard me, and he said it was probably just another house nearby cuz he could smell it too, on the other side of the house.
I went back to sleep, and around 6am I woke to him banging around on the back deck right outside my window. He then called out to me to come outside, and he was like dumping water up into the fireplace, and said he thinks something is stuck up in it. It started really smoking, so I got a fire extinguisher, and one of my other friends woke up and was assisting us.
At this point it was REALLY smoky, like pouring out from behind the sides of the fireplace where it met the siding, so I went inside to close my windows so my stuff didn't get all smoky. Then I noticed that my room had no power. I then went "oh shit" and ran outside, and said "OK, this is serious, let's call 911", and we did. Like 30 seconds later, all the alarms went off, and the other 4 guys woke up and wandered downstairs, wondering what was going on.
So then I told them and we started getting all our stuff out of the house and moving the cars out of the driveway. We were finally able to get the garden hose working (it had a broken piece) and one of my friends was shooting it behind the fireplace as much as he could until the fire department showed up.
They had to rip apart the wall inside the master bedroom, and also the fireplace on the outside, and it took them about 2 hours until the inner bits of the wall had stopped burning up.
The fire chief said that the flue of the fireplace had holes burned in it over time because it wasn't opening and closing properly. So all the heat from every fire put in it over the years was constantly rushing up through the chimney, and there was a crack in the back of the chimney, which is how the fire started in the wall.
He said had it been another hour the whole back of the house, if not the house itself, could have gone up in flames, and that between us soaking the wall and calling them early, the house was easily saved from far worse damage.
I was rather lucky that my friend was a light sleeper and got up early to clean and start making coffee around 5:30 and noticed it. Could have been way worse, especially for me being right next to it.
All of our stuff stiiiiiiiinks now of smoke, and we were kind of frazzled from the nasty smells of the burning materials. We ended up packing up, getting breakfast, and left for Bethlehem around 11.
So yeah, that was my weekend 