Mother Nature can sure pack a whallop
We’ve been dealing with car transmission problems for the past two week. The first weekend in May, we lost all the gears except 1st on our way home from Virginia. Monday, we took the car in to the garage. They checked it out and an hour later determined it was indeed the transmission and they needed to order a new one for a replacement as the current one was 13 years old and not likely to last if they rebuilt it. Okay, we rented a car and left it there. We picked it up that Saturday and found that the gears were hard to move into, it popped like a new driver shifting a manual (this is an automatic). We got home and had to go to a meeting and on the way the caution light lit up. Next day we called the garage and they said not to drive it and to bring it back in but they’d order another one. So, on Monday we rented another car for a week. Tonight we picked up the car again with its second new transmission. This time it seems to work. A bit hard to shift from Park to Drive but otherwise pretty smooth. We need to take it back in 10 days for a check.
On the way back we returned the rental car and decided to get all the grocery shopping done because we were there and then tomorrow just do the recycling center. Then yard work and house cleaning. But…
After the first stop it started to rain as we got into the car and then about 3 minutes later we had this…these were all taken from a moving car with the window down.
At first it just seemed like a really heavy rain storm with lightening and thunder. It was coming down in buckets. Then it started to hail. At first I didn’t think much about it then it got bigger and heavier and I remembered my camera.
This photo is only a few feet further down the road and you can see the entrance to Denny’s is now in deep water.
The road was covered with standing water and spraying up from all the cars but the worst was the hail. This next photo is barely 3 feet along from the last one. It’s a bit fuzzier than the others partly because now it was scary. The hail was banging on the roof and the windows and we were really afraid that the windshield would crack or break. You can see the white hail stones on the grass check against the picture above and you’ll see less hail — that’s how hard and fast it was falling.
I should mention this was during rush hour traffic on this route. Cars were pretty much bumper to bumper. We’re all being pounded by these fairly big hail stone — when it stopped at the shopping center, we check and they seemed to vary from 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Solid ice hitting cars. We got a couple of small dents in the roof but the windows are fine.
Cars were trying to get off the road and find a place to get under cover. There’s no place to do that. What trees there are were in the meridians and this is an area of strip malls with big open parking lots.
Later we heard people on their cells to family talking and remembering the big LaPlata tornado a couple of years back and the damage it did. People remember. I’ve been through hail storms before but nothing like this one — all the others were the ones were the hail was about the size of a pea or smaller.
I guess it’s not nice to take Mother Nature for granted — ever.
[Hyperion here:] I also took a few short bursts of video with my cell phone, but the format isn’t compatible with any viewers except the one on my phone. I’ll see if I can’t find some conversion software and add them to the post in a day or two.