We had weather!!! This storm produced what news outlets are dubbing the worst hail storm to hit Sydney in 20 years. My friend and I were actually VERY lucky during it, we got all the pretty and excitement, and none of the damage… while the area called North Sydney, which is a short walk east of us as the crow flies (its the area of tall buildings on the right side of the image below) got tennis ball sized hail that broke straight through car windows, we only got hail the size of quarters. Apparently, all told, there were 30K lightning strikes over the four hours of the storm. News reports today put the damage into the millions, and 20K homes lost power.
The plan for today was to take advantage of the fact that my one year pass for Scenic World, which I bought last year while in Katoomba, had not yet expired, and drive out there with my travel buddy and his mom. We cancelled because there was a warning of sever storms…. First we had rain coming down in sheets, then we had hail that started out pea size and graduated at about quarter size…
and then we got THIS. note how it seems to be starting just AT — as in in FRONT of the bushes on the far side of the street, AND its a double rainbow?! — you can’t see from this shot but its a COMPLETE rainbow
My travel buddy was in his bedroom, working — he works remotely, hence his ability to travel… but he still has to work…. and had headphones on and was missing the whole thing… when it was hailing, he was not excited… I even brought him a quarter sized piece of it that had landed on the veranda, but NOPE, unimpressed, but THIS woke him up….
What was kind of interesting was that over time it drifted away, as in didn’t get less intense, but seemed to be more out into the distance. FIRST it was in front of the nearby bushes… but then behind them…
But then it moved out like miles away onto the horizon… so that now I could get it all in one shot without having to use panaroma…. and then 45 min later
This was going on…. …. SCARY… The cloud formation in the photo above showed up in a news article the next day…. And according to the news report it was directly over Manley Bay (a few miles east of where we are)
And its not done… at one point I had my back to the window and saw two bolts of lighting reflected in my screen as my room lit up… and there was a building shaking BOOM a second later…
All told, it appears that my weather karma is still holding.
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 