Well, that was exciting.........

Boy, did we have one heck of a thunderstorm go through last night! Wow! And we were only on the edge of it and missed to worst, thank God!! We got about 2.5" of rain out of it and some dime size hail. While my plants look rather ragged, they'll come out of it.

Here's leaves from my hops vine all over the ground. The pic below is what it looks like on the trellis, it used to be completely full of leaves there.

My elderberry bush

 The rhubarb

 With all the rain, the water was really flowing down all the gullies. And through my barn, of course.  You could hear the water roaring in the gullies from the house. It was about 1' deep in the one part I checked out when the storm passed. Further down, where it all comes together, was really rushing. Down by the highway it was like a lake and the little culvert the state has in there was really working overtime! 1/2 mile down the road, the water was running over the highway and left some nice size logs in the road.

But, what we had was nothing. Town, about 10 miles from my place, got hit with way more rain and tennis ball size hail. Windows are broke in houses and cars all over town. The cars look like they've been in a war zone and the rest of town doesn't look much better. Their flash floods made ours look like a trickle. Roads are washed out and many places are left isolated since the alternate routes were already underwater because the river has been running bank full. It went up 3 feet over night and rushed past official flood stage like nobody's business. There's a massive cleanup and help out effort going on now but we can't help since between us and town the road is underwater and closed.

The oldtimers say this is one of the worst storms they can remember. We were watching it as it was coming in and it was dark and starting to turn that nasty bruise color. It was also a rotating wall cloud, which usually means tornado. We are in hilly enough country that that is somewhat unlikely, but still scary to watch, having lived in more tornado prone areas before.

Here's to sunny skies and gentle rains when needed!