Easter was on a Sunday. Do you know what I look forward to on Sundays? A nap! I live for Sunday afternoon naps. I was awoken from my beloved nap by hail. Yes, hail! It was hailing...alot! It was the size of golf balls. Some parts of town got baseball size and even softball size. I am glad we didn't get any that big. This is our backyard, as the hail continues to fall. You can see steam coming up from the ground.
And the front yard. It just covered the ground. It knocked leaves off the trees. The green you see on the ground is leaves, not grass. There is a daycare by my kid's school and all the leaves were knocked off the bushes. It looked really weird. If you look to the street, you can see it covering the street, too.
Here's a close up...it hailed for at least two hours straight! There was also rain. Pouring rain!
It was really loud! I opened the windows to let the cool air come in and we actually had to raise our voices to hear each other talk! Rilian just sat there watching it.
The town we live in does not have a drainage system for the rain. Well, it does, but the drainage system is the streets. That means when it rains, the streets flood. The part of town we live in has some streets close to our house that are major drainage systems. Certain streets become rivers. The water flows pretty fast and even comes above the curbs. No worries, though. As soon as the rain stops, it isn't long before the rivers turn back into streets again. But if it rains alot or for a long time, this can cause a problem.
Jeremy has a side job of repairing iPhones. Alot of people have had cracked or shattered glass on their iPhones and Jeremy fixes them. There have been other things that he has fixed on them, too, but the most common repair is to replace the front glass. He had one that he had just fixed and the owner of it lived near Dallas, but was in town visiting a friend. He was leaving that day to go home, so we needed to get the iPhone to him. We got in the van and navigated around the rivers or flooded streets, whatever you want to call them, as best as we could. It took alot of detours. One of the main streets by our house majorly floods and has a very strong current. A van sits up a little higher than a car, but not as high as a truck or SUV. We found a place to cross this major street that the water was a little lower than it was in a different intersection. There was no way around this street. We had to cross it in order to get to our friend's house. There were a couple of other majorly flooded intersections we had to cross, too. We almost didn't make it through one. We made it to our friend's street. I looked up in the sky and saw a rainbow. I like how the water drops on the windshield look.
In the above picture you can see a glimpse of how the streets flood, but this is nothing compared to other parts of town. We were driving along and passed a van that was on the side of the road and looked like it had just been pulled out of some water. Just as Jeremy made that comment, we were in water...and it was too deep...and our van died. Apparently, that street dipped down and made the water laying there too deep to pass through. You can barely see headlights in the distance in the picture...that is where it happened.
I started calling our friends to see if they could come help us. If we would have opened our doors, water would have come in. To be honest, I don't know how Jeremy got out of the van because I was calling our friends and listening to the comments the kids were making. I didn't really pay attention, I just realized Jeremy was out in the water. It was halfway up his thighs. I asked him later how he got out. He said he climbed out the window. Finn and Seven thought it was fun. They said we were in a pond. Piper was scared at first. I started thinking about how cold the water would be and that I would have to carry them through it. The kids were all wearing rain boots, but if they had gotten in that deep of water, their rain boots would have been pointless. Then a good samaritan in a truck stopped to help us. He hooked a tow strap up to the van. But it kept slipping off every time he tried to drive to pull us out of the water. Finally, he and Jeremy gave up on pulling the van out of the water. So, Jeremy, the good samaritan, and the lady that was with the good samaritan pushed the van to a nearby parking lot that was on a little higher and dry ground, while I steered. Jeremy tried to start the van once...no luck. Because of a previous vehicle drowning experience, Jeremy knew not to keep trying to start the van. About 8 years ago, Jeremy accidentally drowned our 4Runner. I won't go into detail, it's kind of a long story. But the town we live in, had been getting rain for several days and was flooding, literally flooding. And he misjudged the depth of the water and well, the rest is history. I think he might be getting a reputation now. ;)
Since our friends lived less than a mile from where our van drowned, we just walked the rest of the way to their house. The rain had stopped for the time being. The kids were in their rain boots, so we told them they could splash as much as they wanted to on the way to our friend's house. By the time we got there, their boots were filled with water from all the splashing. Seven and Rilian each fell at least once amongst all the splashing on our walk to our friend's house. It also started to rain again, a little.
When we arrived at our friend's house, we went into the backyard and this was the scene...I just thought we were going to dry ground.
Oh well, at least the kids had a blast! I think it's funny that there are plastic Easter Eggs floating in the water.
Salem was pushing her "baby", Piper, in the baby stroller...too funny! And Seven takes a rain boot full of water and dumps it on them.
Are you wondering the outcome of our vehicle? It didn't make it...it served it's time...
We now have to do some vehicle shopping. I was so against getting a van in the first place. I drove a Jeep Wrangler...I could not go from a Jeep Wrangler to a minivan. Those were my thoughts when we were about to have our fourth baby. But financially, buying the minivan we did, was the best decision for us at the time. When the insurance company totaled our minivan, I begged Jeremy, "You made me drive a minivan for two years! Now can I get an SUV?!? If you don't like it, you can drown it, too." We shall see...
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