MOUNT POCONO, Pa. — It was a slow uphill climb to get Pocono Rocks! reopened after a car slammed into a parked car, and both crashed into the building in May.
"I'm saying, 'No, we'll be open in July, we'll be open in August, we'll be open in December,'" said Jodi Bohdal, chef and owner of Pocono Rocks! in Mount Pocono.
Bohdal says though she could tell it looked bad, the damage was worse than she originally thought.
"All the glass flew in; the stone wall flew in, tables were crushed."
And she says repairs took way longer than she hoped.
"Of course we’re in this COVID life right now so, everything’s on backorder, everything’s waiting," she said. "It took probably a minimum of five months just to get windows in here. It is a special building; everything needs to be special ordered, framework."
But finally, seven months later, the brand-new doors of the restaurant in Mount Pocono are open again.
And parents couldn't wait to bring their little ones back.
"It's so fantastic, right? We like to come here and play," Chris Jerlinski of Tannersville said, while holding his 2-year-old daughter.
"We're so happy because we waited to reopen like a long time, seven months, I think so. But it's happy, happy, happy to be here," Carolina Collao, visiting with her one-year-old daughter, said.
The owners say while everything is complete and ready to go on the inside, they are still waiting for a couple things outside, like the streetlight that got knocked out.
Bohdal says their insurance handled most of the issues. And while the business is finally back in action, the entire summer season was lost.
"We're alive, we ate, we got paid, we had some time off, so I'm not going to complain about it, but no, we definitely didn't put in the bank what we would normally make on a busy, rainy summer no less," Bohdal said.
Bohdal says it was frustrating at the time but she calls it an act of God.
"If you want the honest, I needed to be fixed. I had a couple little medical things going on, and my infinite wisdom of a 14-year-old son, he said, 'Well, mom, what were you going to do, just wait till you fell over in the kitchen?'"
She also used the time she had to become chair of the Mount Pocono Borough Safety Commission, hoping to make the streets all around safer.