M and I were commenting yesterday afternoon on how lucky we were that the rain held out all day. I think maybe we jinxed ourselves by saying that. We left Manhattan at around 5:30, but not before I had him stop by Starbucks to pick up a frappacino. It started raining once I got back into the car, and got worse fairly quickly as we approached the Holland Tunnel, but good thing there wasn't a lot of traffic from the Hudson Street approach, so we made it through without any problems. Once we got to the New Jersey side, everything was all dry -- not a drop of water in sight. I even said to M how surprised I was that there was such a big difference in weather just across the river. Again, I may have jinxed us by saying that.
As we went onto the Pulaski Skyway, the clouds above us darkened and rain started coming down with increasing speed. We got onto Rt. 1, and by then, the loud plickering and plackering of the rain on our car was so loud we couldn't hear the radio anymore. I kept looking towards the back seat to see if baby K was okay, but fortunately, she was sound asleep, oblivious to the storm we were entering into. M slowed down and put on his hazards, and for good reason, since we had pretty much no visibility to anything in front of us. We saw cars pulling over to the shoulder of the road, so we did the same. By then, hail had started coming down. We stayed put for a few minutes, amazed and frightened at how other drivers could zoom by without their lights or hazards on. When the hail stopped, we made our way through the torrential downpour and got onto Rt. 22, where we discovered some flash floods. Pearl went through a river of water that was probably close to the height of her tires at one point. At a few other spots, the flash floods were so bad that we had to find a detour to get around them.
We eventually made it home in one piece, but I have never been in a moving vehicle with such horrific weather. Even the days of heavy snowstorms in Binghamton did not compare to this. In retrospect, I should have whipped out the camera and taken some shots of our commute home, but of course, it's always easy to think of these things after the fact.
2 comments:
Oy! I'm so glad you guys got home safely. I like that you waited out the hail on the side of the road especially since the car itself is a safe place to be.
We drove in that general direction too (cheaper to go through NJ and we get gas too), but that was about 2 hours earlier.
wow! glad you guys got home safe and sound! pretty brutal out there in NJ! i won't complain about the lack of extreme heat this summer but i will complain about all these electrical storms and heavy rains! oh mother nature, give us some consecutive days of sunshine!
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