A portent of things to come?

Yesterday was a very strange day weather-wise. We knew to expect rain, but for most of the day all we got were threatening, overcast skies. It finally did rain around 3:30 p.m. and it rained pretty hard. We got a third of an inch of rain.

Then the sun came out.

And we were treated by yet another beautiful rainbow.

It was so nice that we took a walk after dinner. Everthing was sparkly clean.

As we came back up the hill from our walk, we noticed that Bull Mountain was disappearing from view behind a fog bank. Creepy, really.

We came back in and sat out on the porch for a while just listening to the silence. We came inside and started a fire (the first one of the stay) in the big fireplace and prepared to watch a movie. When I turned around to look outside, gray tendrils of fog were making their way through the trees and in seconds we were surrounded in a cloud. I have never seen fog so thick up here before. It stuck around until we went to bed. Heavy, thick, wet fog. Everything was dripping.

At one o'clock in the morning we were rudely awakened with no warning by what sounded like a freight train coming through the cabin. I jolted upright in bed and said to RIck "what the ??" At first we thought it was just really heavy rain. The dogs were freaking out. Hailey was shaking and Bella jumped up on the bed. Rick got up and turned on the outside light to see that it was hailing and big clumps of ice were sliding off the roof. Have you ever heard a downpour of pellet-sized hail on a metal roof? Let me tell you from experience -- it's LOUD! It continued its onslaught for about ten minutes, then the storm let out a big flash of lightning and a big boom of thunder and it let up. A few more blindingly bright (even with curtains closed) flashes of lightning and booming claps of thunder and the storm rolled on to annoy others in its path.

This morning there was still some hail left that had come off the roof.

The weather station said we got just over a quarter of an inch of hail in ten mintues' time.

Weather in the high country is always interesting!