The distant black clouds looked just that; distant!
So, armed with poo bags and a pouch full of cheese, the dogs and I ventured out to the park.
The wind was blowing in the general direction of Caerphilly ... where the clouds were ... so we took off on out walk.
Half way across the fields the wind dropped. Never mind, I thought. We'll still make before any rain falls.
Thunder began to boom. As I look towards Caerphilly I could see the blackness in the sky begin to spiral down, creating a huge black funnel.
The birds stopped singing!
More thunder.
Now, Sym is bomb-proof when out with his ball. Sox ... dear ol' Sox (on her third outing since starting her meds) ... is as deaf as a post and continues to sniff the news where ever it had been sprayed. Clover, on the other hand, is a sensitive soul and very soon began to become skittish. Normally she would be close at my heels whilst Sym chased and Sox sniffed. Today, with the now not-so-distant thunder booming around us, she had become somewhat hyper and raced backwards and forwards between Sym and myself.
We turned and made tracks back to the car park.
Then it went dark!
No rain fell but, as we raced across the field as fast as Sox's legs could manage, the hale came down!
I could no longer hear the thunder. The 'pinging' of hale the size of mint imperials was drowning it out.
Clover was near to panic! Sox found a turn of speed that would have made a greyhound envious! Sym decided to check out the woods for squirrels!
I couldn't see where I was going as hale was threatening to put my eyes out.
I blindly rounded up the beasts and we raced for the car.
On the car park, a young female jogger that had passed us earlier, was desperately looking for her car keys. Her hair was almost white from the hale and she was soaked to the skin.
She was still looking for them when I bundled the beast onto the back seat.
I wiped my glasses and dried my eyes on a tissue.
Before I could even start the car, the hale had stopped. The sun briefly popped back into the sky.
I noticed that the jogger had found her keys.
Then, just as I was considering that we could possibly go back out for a little while, the hale came down in earnest and pounded my car.
Clover freaked out.
It was time to go home.
It's a risky business stepping outside your front door. I think Bilbo Baggins said this.
ReplyDeleteOn Christmas Day last year we had a hailstorm that smashed holes my skylight in the dining room and sand blasted the concrete driveway clean. Insurance companies wrote off thousands of cars because of hail damage to the body work. Did ya car suffer any hail damage? :-).
ReplyDeleteNothing! Mind you, you wouldn't notice another few dents on my car which, when all is said and done, is just a collection of dents on wheels anyway!
DeleteThats serious hail, we rarely get that and never enough to blind.. having said that we got a hailstorm of orange sized hail that did millions of dollars damage just a few months ago (first time ever)
ReplyDeleteI have a couple of sore spots on my head where I got hit, but generally speaking the hale was of the softer ... therefore safer ... variety.
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