A bit of an adventure today.

I took my youngest (5 y.o.) on a bike ride today. It was hot, but what the heck. I took her to a nice hard-pack and level bike path, the C&O canal towpath. It's known as the nations skinniest national park. Anyway, it's right alongside the Potomac River and completely canopied by mature hardwoods in most sections, so I figured correctly that it would be ten or twelve degrees cooler there. We were having a nice ride and saw a deer, a skink (the reptile, I didn't mis-spell), some grey heron, and were generally having a nice time.

Then I got a call from a friend who knew I was heading out. She said there were major storms blowing up and headed for the river. I had about twenty minutes to get out of there before we were in some serious stuff.

Well, we made it most of the way, but we still had about a mile and a half to the safety of the truck when the storm hit. There was nothing for it but to keep peddling. There were trees crashing in the woods, the tops of some of them being sheared from the bottoms and large limbs crashing through. I had to dodge a few smaller limbs and was hit on the back by one of them, but kept peddling so it was OK. My daughter was terrified from the thunder and I kept reassuring her that the thunder couldn't hurt us. I never mentioned that the lightning could, or that I was really worried about the big limbs crashing all around us.

We made it to the truck. I was soaked, but I had stopped long enough to close up the windows on the trailer and so my girl was pretty dry. I considered sitting it out right there, but the lightning had moved off by the then and the truck was in an open enough area that I wasn't concerned for limbs. I literally threw the bike and trailer into the bed of the truck, slapped a couple bungees on in a half-hearted fashion, and we hit the road.

The main road was blocked. Fortunately, I had my GPS with 100k topos of the area overlaid on a detailed road map. So we were able to finesse our way down dirt roads at no more than fifteen and usually ten or so mph. I had to get out and move more limbs and trees than I can count. Several I couldn't move and had to four wheel it a bit on the banks. But we made it home with nothing but a story to tell.

I can't recall ever seeing a storm blow up that fast. It was hot when we left, but I didn't see anything on RADAR. I thought our highest risk was dehydration or heat stroke, and was ready to prevent those. I didn't think to bring a chain saw and full body armor.

- Zurf