My summer vacation (or, 'if you want rain, go to Florida')
Did you know it is raining in other parts of the country? I heard news reports of torrential rains and flooding, but naturally I thought it was all a myth.
I thought other states were suffering as much as Alabama from lack of rain, that crops in other regions were withering and dying in the harsh, unrelenting sunlight.
I write this on a laptop on the way back from Saint Augustine, Florida-in my opinion, one of the most beautiful cities in the country. My husband and I have had this trip planned for months, four tiny days of vacation all year long.
Rain never even entered our minds-after all, the Southeast is entrenched in a severe drought, right? It wouldn't dare rain on our vacation. That is the cruelest form of irony.
On Friday, our first full day of vacation, we set off for the soft flour-like sands of Saint Augustine beach, towels and reading materials in tow (you notice I didn't say sunscreen-I'll get into that in a moment). We had no sooner laid dipped our toes in the crystal clear waters of the Atlantic when we heard the rumble.
Was that my stomach, I wondered?
Couldn't be, I had breakfast. Then I turned around and saw what in North Alabama would be a beautiful sight...a giant thunderhead coming our way, purple and swollen with hours worth of beach-spoiling rain.
We barely made it back to the car before the bottom fell out. It rained all afternoon.
And all night. And into the next day.
Our friends we were visiting said it was the steadiest rain they'd had all summer.
On our way to dinner, ditches were overflowing and flooding roads-it was quite a storm.
Going back to our omission of sunscreen, we did actually manage to spend four rain-free hours swimming and sunbathing on our second day there-literally four hours of clear skies in our 96 hours of vacation.
From this four hours I achieved the level of sunburn bestowed only onto those who have been indoors without sunlight all summer long.
From just those four little hours of beach time my back and shoulders are still itching and stinging maddeningly.
While I am upset at the unfairness of the weather and my woeful omission of SPF, I do appreciate the value of a vacation.
We had four blissful child-free days, and, rain or not, it was great.
A change of scenery, however short, is very refreshing.
And hopefully some of that beach-ruining rain will follow us back up to our desperately dry North Alabama.
