Friday my mom and I went up to Abilene to pick up her van from the repair garage. Her and my sister were in an accident up there. She's been waiting for 2 freaking months to get it back because the insurance company of the other party was slow to do their jobs. It wasn't my mom's fault, they had a green light and a woman and man in a small sedan ran their red light and entered the intersection. So mom hit their car even though she had slammed on the brakes. The eerie part is that while all this was happening Union Pacific has a line that parallels that street. There was a train on it at the time. The other car was planning on going straight. Well, the scary part is that had my mom not hit them, they probably would have been hit by the train since they would have goine through the intersection. They said during the wreck the train engineer was blaring his horn because he knew what was about to happen. The woman seemed to be pretty oblivious to the seriousness of that. Their car had some damage on the passenger-side, but mom's van was damaged enough that they couldn't drive it home.
Anyway, Friday as we left it was dark and rainy in Austin. It was pouring from downtown to North Austin. Once we got to about Lampasas it quit. It rained off after that. But once we got to within 30 miles of 20 miles of Abilene we headed into a thunderstorm. The sight of those dark clouds was quite ominous. Abilene had had heavy, steady rains for the past 2 days, and over the last month they've had some serious rain with some flooding. Friday morning an 18-wheeler was blown over and there was atleast one confirmed tornado in Silverton, Texas. This was all part of the same system which spawned tornados in Colorado and New Mexico last week. The whole northern half and western half of Texas had some serious weather. North of Waco they had flooding as deep as 4 feet and there were several water rescues in the Hill Country, and one in Austin.
The view coming in.
All the streets in the area looked like this. It was nuts.
Our turn.
There was a car stalled on the street to the left where that bus is. And wouldn't know it, that's where we had to go.
Right next to the repair garage there was a drainage canal that lead into a detention pond.
There's a curb under that water to the left about a foot out from the grass.
City worker.
Closed street.
I shot some video while I was at it.
With the van in one piece again, we drove home leaving the rental car in Abilene. I could have kissed our van, which is all wheel drive and high off the ground.
The drive home. This was just south of Abilene. It wasn't really raining here, but the fog was out in full force. That's Kirby Lake back there.
The hills.
I tried getting some lightning shots, but had no luck. It was lightning like crazy too. This is all I came up with, just one little flash in those clouds. But later on it was lightning like crazy and POURING down rain until we got about 40 miles from Austin. Then it quit. Parts of 183 just northwest of Austin as covered with water. At one spot we hit a huge puddle and a wall of water sprayed up as high as the windshield, and we have a Chevy Astro.
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