Day 168: Near Mrs?

Today's temperatures were in the 90s again and this afternoon, the clouds started menacing ready for a thunderstorm to hit. We saw the first bolt of lightning from the office window as I was preparing to leave. I made it to the car before either electricity or precipitation could get me, but from there things went downhill.

My route took me first towards the storm. Then at some point, added to lightning and very loud thunder came the wind and the rain. The main road turned into a procession of cars and trucks with hazard lights flashing, wipers on full-tilt, and driving extremely slowly. Every slight depression in the road had turned into a deep puddle and even the undepressed parts were very wet indeed. Several cars had stopped. I can't say it didn't cross my mind to do the same and wait it out, but I really wanted to get home to see how the rest of the family was doing.

When I got nearly home I found half the road blocked by a fallen branch and when I got to the end of our road, I couldn't have carried on past even if I'd wanted to thanks to a fallen tree.
Anyway I got home safely and the weather started to lift. At some point I looked out of the window and saw that half a tree had come down between our house and next-door. It had narrowly missed doing significant damage to their house. Close inspection showed that it had almost certainly been hit by lightning.

When we saw a traffic report after I had been home for 20 minutes or so, two of the roads I had used to get home were closed due to debris and fallen trees. Next time maybe I'll wait it out at work.