As you know, the weather is always on my mind and something I watch constantly. Going through the winter with me was a lot of fun - all of our new experiences with cold and snow - even thundersnow. Now, though, we are experiencing the mountain spring. And we got a dramatic taste of that on Wednesday. Every day this week, and often in the afternoons since we have started to have warm days, we have had an afternoon thunderstorm blow up. Many days, you could look off in the distance and tell it might come, but a couple of times, it has been sudden and surprising. Wednesday was one of those days.
I had been teaching English, and my husband came to pick me up. There is a nearby grocery store, so we stopped by to get a few things. I went into the store, got my things and came out just a few minutes later. When I came out, the sky look ominous. Lightning was flashing and the clouds were hanging low and black. We raced home, and just missed beating the storm. As we pulled into the parking lot, the hail began to fall. It was mixed in size, but some definitely reached golfball size. It came down so fast and furious that it reminded me (and this will really date me for all you younger readers) of the moments on Captain Kangaroo when Mr. Moose would dropped hundreds of ping-pong balls on his head. Honestly, I was really worried that they would punch through my umbrella and damage the car and windows.
After getting into the building, we dashed upstairs where the windows had been left open. The force of the storm had sent hail all in the front bedroom (the kids' room) and down the hallway almost 20 feet into the apartment! The kids' room was covered in rain water and hail. The hail had cemented to the carpet the way ice sticks to your tongue.
It was quite a mess to clean up, but it was nothing compared to a small town in the region of Baden-Württemberg the previous day. I had looked online at the German newspaper that's written in English and saw an article on a significant storm they had there on Tuesday. About 30 km west southwest of Stuttgart in a town called Wildberg-Gütlingen, they had 50 centimeters of hail!! That is 1.4 inches of hail!!
The local county had to call out the winter snow-clearing equipment. In addition, the regional fire departments and emergency personnel were sent out to help residents with flooding basements and roadways. The storm lasted a total of 1 hour. The storm was one in a group of storms that hit the country to our west. Karlsruhe, which is slightly northwest of Stuttgart was also hit with hail and heavy flooding.
The storms have been hit and miss, but often with lots of spots of hail each day. We are set to have another round this afternoon, but where it will be severe is less predictable. I had a conversation with a local about the storms to see if this is normal spring weather, and she said no. That within the last 5 years or so, hail has been much more frequent - but during the summer. This is much earlier than usual for the summer-like storms. In fact, another article on this same site discussed how April was the warmest in 120 years. It makes me really wonder about the summer. I have my fingers crossed that cooler, wetter days are in store, but I am definitely not holding my breath.
The word for today is hail: der Hagel (hah gl - rhymes with boggle).
The question for the day is "What does an American composer, a British orchestra, and a small town in Germany have in common?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
