Me'n the Child Bride are on the road atm, half-way across the country trying to get thru to visit family (sorta sadly that we're not on the Spyder & not for the 'good' kind of visit that you can readily postpone, either!
but sorta thankful we're not on the Spyder too! Read on -
) We've left the gradually fading heat of South Ozzie's 'mild Autumn' behind only to drive into flooding rains & the worst weather events some parts of the Ozzie East Coast have experienced in the last hundred years or so! :shocked:
Temps aren't too bad - it's not
COLD by any stretch of the imagination, but it
is really stickily humid and either drizzling rain, about to rain, or absofreakinlutely bucketing down rain; while just about every little creek &/or depression that might conceivably hold water is rapidly flooding or well & truly flooded already!! :shocked: . We've had to leave the 'most direct' path & re-route numerous times to avoid floods, flooded bridges, trees over the roads, landslides, accidents, and even just massive queues of cars filled with people evacuating from low lying river flood-plains &/or coastal areas, and we
still haven't made it to where we need to be!! :gaah:
Just to make it worse, all this rain/flood water is pouring onto the vast tracts of land that were so severely burnt about a year ago, so there's not really all that much deep-rooted vegetation left to hold onto what little's left of the soil, so the erosion damage is going to be horrific once the rain stops.... Talking to the locals we meet along the way who've already been thru so much and were only just beginning to get back on their feet is really hard, but
much harder for them!! :lecturef_smilie: . We stopped & spent some time helping recover one bloke who was stuck in a roadside paddock & just about ready to give up; then we just sat in the rain with him for about an hour while he watched most of his property's top-soil & crop wash down-stream & away - in a 'creek' that his family going back 4 generations had never known to even
carry water, let alone flood.... :yikes: Yet when we left, he was already planning their way ahead!
hyea:
The forecast for the week where we
need to be is pretty much all 'Rain; Torrential Rain; Flood Warnings; Hazardous Surf Warnings; Storm Surge Warnings; Strong Winds & Gale Warnings; Hazardous Road Condition Warnings; and temps barely reaching the high teens (°C) with lotsa RAIN!! :shocked: . But with any luck, we'll finally get thru later on this morning (it's
early morning on Monday the 22th here!
) so we'll be visiting with the Child Bride's family for the first time in a few years, what with not being able to get in due to droughts, bushfires, storms, et al; and now there's all these floods - but the floods don't really stand a chance of stopping us.... they haven't met my wife before nor know how determined she can be! :2thumbs:
Indiana has received lots of rain this morning, 42°F now. 
