...and Then the World Exploded

Short Version:
Delicious foods, tasty beer, a spot in the sun. The Weatherman is proved right, and then some! Wake up, time to die.

Long Version:
Delicious foods*, tasty beer**, and a warm spot in the last of the sunlight, with a spectacular view of the lightning playing in and around the distant cloudbanks to the south and the east. We'd had "Bad weather's a-comin," warnings from some yokel with a Weather Channel addiction, but figured it had gone around us as we sat in our deckchairs watching the two separate lightshows.

Then, without warning, we were wet.

As we'd watched the horizons to the south and the east, another storm had snuck in from the north and opened up a biblical deluge right over us. We calmly discussed the situation, and figured that this maybe meant that we should forego the tent-sleep experience, so we unhurriedly housed the bikes and other hardy items under canvas and threw ourselves into the Reaper, which was reverberating under the hammer-blows of rain like nothing we'd ever experienced. Conversation was impossible.

And then it was silent. Absolute sound-vacuum. We opened the rear doors cautiously, and heard the sound of the rain smashing into the dirt diminishing as the open cloud moved away southwards across the plain at high speed. The lightning was still flashing tinily in the distance, and we sat and watched with the rear doors open, stunned by the sudden onslaught and equally swift cessation of hostilities.

Then the world exploded.

The blackness of the desert night was all of a sudden replaced by the brightest, whitest light, and the silence was not so much broken as shattered, hugely and rudely and all-encompassingly, by the sound of every firework you've ever heard all going off at once, combined with the noise that would be made if all the lions and tigers and bears that have ever walked the earth were somehow yelling their displeasure in unison. We were blinded, and deafened, and damn near soiling our britches.

It was incredible.

And it went on and on and on; first the light disappeared, leaving everything in absolute darkness while the thunder rolled on and on in the void. Then the noise also ceased, leaving us breathless and shaken, ears ringing in the sudden silence. A pause, long enough for brains to reboot, and for thoughts to occur. Thoughts like: "Should we really be sitting inside a big metal box which is the tallest thing on this flat, largely featureless plain of dirt, while lightning of that magnitude strikes with such vehemence and overwhelming force so close by?" And then the world was gone agin, replaced by the light and the sound and the shitting of bricks.

After what seemed like forever, the barrage wandered off south in pursuit of the rain that had foreshadowed its onslaught, and watching it once again became a spectator sport instead of a futile gesture towards meeting one's end relatively bravely and with eyes open***. Tiny fires were being kindled and dying on ever-more-distant hilltops, and eventually the adrenaline subsided enough for us to drift off to sleep.










* = Corn chips with salsa made from a can of Western Family brand Mexican Tomatoes (with Lime Juice and Cilantro). The juice from this tin was delicious, and, we suspect, would mix really really well with vodka to produce one of the yummiest intoxicants imaginable

** = Ninkasi Brewery's Tricerahops. Nom nom nom nom nom****

*** = Wincing doesn't count as closing them, does it?

**** = In the "Ingesting something delicious" sense, not the stupid French people "Without" meaning