I don't know why, but it almost always only rains at night here....occasionally in the evenings or very early mornings, but almost never during daylight hours. And the rain is usually accompanied by thunder and lightning... Usually, storms aren't enough of a bother to keep us awake at night and it's become a pretty routine occurrence around here. If it's raining really hard we close our north-facing windows and if the thunder and lightning look and sound like they're nearby we unplug our modem so it doesn't get fried (and yet we've still had to replace it 4-5 times this summer already!!) and the muddy streets are a major bummer, but overall...the storms are pretty harmless here.
And then THE Storm happened. For some dumb reason, I couldn't fall asleep that night and was lying in bed when I heard it start to rain pretty hard after midnight. No big surprise, it's still the rainy season and September usually brings about 14 inches of rain on average. (I literally just checked my phone to make sure that it's still September. I have no clue.) The wind picked up and our bedroom would light up at random due to flashes of lightning and I heard rumblings of thunder a ways off... Still no big deal, just another night.
Ty says that he was once told that the seconds between a lightning strike and the following thunder indicates how far away the strike was.... "One-one thousand" being about a mile....so if you count to ten between lightning and thunder then the strike was about 10 miles away, for example. I have no idea if that's true, and I'm too lazy to bother Googling it, but it seems pretty accurate.
The rain and thunder got progressively louder until it woke Ty up... We closed the windows above our bed and Ty went to the kitchen to unplug the modem, because according to Ty's rule-of-thumb, the storm was passing right over us and it was gonna get ugly. As he was coming back to our room and closed our bedroom door, lightning either struck our house or a nearby electrical line/pole because the light above our bed made a huge POP that sounded like glass shattering and I ducked thinking I was gonna feel glass rain down on top of me. And Ty told me later that he felt like he got zapped while he had his hand on the metal door knob. Immediately following the lightning, the LOUDEST, LONGEST, SCARIEST thunder to ever exist in the history of ever came down on us like a bomb exploding in our bedroom. And then the most adorable thing in the history of ever happened...
I proceed to watch a 39-year old man race across his bedroom, LEAP into bed and cling to his wife like a 4-year old clinging to a teddy bear because there was a monster under the bed. And then I watched as he was immediately embarrassed for doing so. It will forever be in my top ten favorite Ty moments. Every time I've thought about it since, I get this doofy looking grin on my face. Adorable, I tell you.
The lightning struck our house, or very nearby, 3 more times that night and there were at least a dozen instances of the loudest, bone-rattling thunder imaginable and hours of clinging to each other like scared little kids in our bed. Me squealing every time and sorta laugh-sobbing in hysterics, Ty burying his head under his pillow.... Both of us worrying that the vibrations from the thunder alone were gonna shatter our windows... It was very intense (and very hilarious) to say the least.
During the storm, we noticed that Bloo was hunkered down in his bed and looked really frightened so I invited him up to snuggle with me...solely to make HIM feel safer. It definitely wasn't for my sake. Nope, not at all. Bloo was to my left and Ty was to my right and together we "braved" the rest of the storm like the whitest, gringo-est, most adorable, scaredy cat little expat family you ever did see.
Welp, that was our first major storm experience, and we hope it's the worst storm we see.... Ty is for sure gonna hate this post, but I'm okay with that. Adios mi amigos!
I wish that my husband and I had been brave enough to do such an adventure. We now come down from Oregon for 3 months to escape the rain and grey! I think that I would have loved being in that storm...but those strikes are a little too close!
ReplyDeleteI'm loving reading your blog. We are crossing the border 10/9 in our RV, staying for 5 or 6 months. We are torn between moving permanently or just continue to visit. Have fun and keep posting, luv your writing style!
ReplyDeleteI'm loving reading your blog. We are crossing the border 10/9 in our RV, staying for 5 or 6 months. We are torn between moving permanently or just continue to visit. Have fun and keep posting, luv your writing style!
ReplyDeleteAwesome writing and bit of a flashback. We stayed in an apartment overlooking the fishmarket with a palapa roof on Albatros when we stayed there. Loved La Cruz and Anna Banana's and Eva's. Remember my feet never being clean and also never wore underwear. Oops, too much information. Will be staying in PV but often visit La Cruz. Keep on posting. Love it.
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