October 30, 2005

We were at Gary's parents, where it was sunny and fine.  The wind started howling and a few raindrops fell, but it wasn't raining too much.  We got in the car to come home and could see the storm in the distance.  About 10km along, we reached the storm.  It rained and as we got closer to home, it got worse and worse.  The hail started falling, the rain was coming down in sheets.  It was very scary. 

At home, we had 45mm of rain in 35 minutes!

The advantage of flourescent raingear for bicyclists can be seen in this shot taken through our car windshield.

When we approached this corner, we thought that it couldn't get much worse than this.  We were wrong.

 The rain and hail was pelting the car, and as you can see, the visibility was about one car length.  We saw some fool cross the road at the intersection just in front of us (which you can't see) who was driving his car with no lights on.  

This is what 44mm of rain in 35 minutes does to our front lawn.  Gary was going to mow the lawn this afternoon but he'll have to wait now until he can get the mower across the bridge (currently underwater).

It stopped raining briefly, so Gary went down to see the level of water on the lawn.  The bridge was built so that it was higher than any water level that we'd measured over the course of the previous year.  This water, as you can see, was much higher than that.