Tag Archives: torrential rain

2014/06/11 (W) GLAMARAMA14 Day 1

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Although the opening ceremonies for the 2014 Great Lakes Area Motorcoach Association (GLAMA) area rally (GLAMARAMA14) took place at 7:30 PM, the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds were busy with activity all day.  The golf cart shuttles started running at 7:30 AM and the parking crew members were at their stations and started parking motorhomes at 8:00 AM.  The registration building was open at 8:00 AM, the indoor vendors were open at 9:00 AM, and the food vendors were open at 10 AM.

The Fleetwood Motorhome Association (FMA) had rolled their rally into the GLAMARAMA, and as part of their participation they sponsored Gary Bunzer, the RV Doctor, as the featured speaker.  Gary normally only does national rallies and GLAMARAMA14 was the first time he had agreed to speak at an FMCA area rally.  He was scheduled for a full set of presentations starting at 1:30 PM today.  There were no other seminars at that time and he drew a large crowd, as he usually does.  He had a second seminar starting at 3:30 PM but we could not attend as we were scheduled to drive golf carts from 4:00 – 6:30 PM.  Fortunately he is repeating that seminar on Saturday.

Sometime during the last day or so I received a draft copy of the June 2014 Bus Conversion Magazine for review of my cover/centerfold article on the Cool Cruiser; a GM PD4106 I photographed at the 2014 Arcadia Bus Rally in late December.  I sent back a few minor corrections.  The editor had some health issues that delayed the May issue and they are working very hard to get the caught up so I got my comments back to the ASAP.

We had received an e-mail a week or so ago regarding the RVillage Ambassador Program and had responded that we were definitely interested in participating.  Earlier this week we were notified that a webinar was scheduled for Saturday May 14 at noon.  I e-mailed back that we could not participate in the webinar at that date/time due to GLAMARAMA activities.

At 4:00 PM we picked up our golf carts and headed out for two and a half hours of fun driving around the fairgrounds meeting people and providing rides and/or directions.  There had been a threat of rain all day but it held off until after our shift ended.

The evening entertainment was provided by New Odyssey, an extremely high-energy three-man group out of Chicago, Illinois that plays 30 different instruments.  They put on a great, but slightly familiar, show and we finally figured out that we had seen them a few years ago at a G.L.A.S.S. rally in Berrien Springs, Michigan.  (Great Lakes Area Spring Spree.)

Before the show ever started the skies opened up and it rained very hard.  We had left the roof vents/fans open/on, with a running computer sitting directly under one of them, so I ran back to the coach to close everything up.  It was a short distance, but I was soaked by the time I went 10 feet.  Ironically, but luckily, not a single drop of rain had entered the coach, perhaps because we were parked under a very large tree.  Still, I closed everything, dried off and changed into my rain gear for the walk back to the assembly hall.

 

2014/04/15 (T) A Taxing Day

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At 1:30 AM (Tuesday, April 15) my cell phone issued a severe weather alert tone.  The message from the Weather Channel app was an emergency notification that a flash flood warning had been issued for Freeport and advised us to seek higher ground but to not drive through water.  If we had not already been awake, we were now!  But then, that is the point of having your cell phone set up to alert you to dangerous and threatening conditions with a sound that announces an imminent nuclear attack.  As if that wasn’t enough, the leak at the passenger-side rear corner of our bedroom vent-fan reappeared.  I had applied a liberal coat of Dicor self-leveling lap sealant to the outside of that vent-fan back at Williston Crossings and it had not leaked during two subsequent heavy rain events, so I thought I had taken care of that problem.  Either I missed a spot or the water got in somewhere else.

Although Live Oak Landing is on the Choctawhatchee River it is on ground that is noticeably higher than the water level and the RV sites are not right at the bank.  I figured we were safe as we could see the east end of Choctawhatchee Bay from the front of our bus.  Ocean water levels rise and fall with the tides, but oceans don’t flood.  The interior roads and sites are paved, so they were not going to get washed out by the rain and we were not going to be mired in soft ground.

We had a lull in the rain between 3:00 and 5:30 AM and I used the time to work on blog posts covering the 12th through the 14th and keep an eye on the weather.  I prefer doing one post per day, and uploading it before I go to bed, but that is not always possible.  When I first started blogging I would often write the rough draft in bed on my iPad, e-mail it to myself, get up early the next morning, finish it, and upload it.  I still do that sometimes, but just as often I end up several days behind.  BTW:  The WiFi at Live Oak Landing is very good.  We have been able get connected and do what we needed to do, even when it was raining.  We also have an acceptable Verizon 4G/LTE signal here.

The rain resumed briefly at 5:30 AM but without the previous intensity and fanfare.  It started again at 6:50 AM.  I checked the radar on my iPad Wundermap app and it showed the cold front just a few miles to our west and another fetch of rain beginning to come on shore and positioned to train over us.  It was not severe, however, and the band ultimately drifted east of us before coming onshore.  The rain event in most of the panhandle was done by 8:30 AM.   The end of the rain event, however, was not the end of the weather warnings.  Flash floods occur during and shortly after heavy rain events, but rivers can rise above flood stage long after the rains have moved through as large volumes of water upstream try to make their way to the sea.

There was no sunrise today, just a gradual change from night to muted, grey light that continued through the morning.  By mid-morning the cold front had passed by us, the winds had shifted from southwesterly to due north, and the temperature had dropped. A low pressure center had moved directly over Atlanta, Georgia with the cold front trailing SSE into the Gulf and the rainy weather shifted to northeast Florida, downeast Georgia, and up the Atlantic coast.  A wider view of the continent showed the heaviest weather farther north.  The cold front stretched along the Appalachian Mountains, up through Quebec and then wrapped around through Labrador and into the Labrador Sea.  There were four additional low pressure centers located in northeast Pennsylvania, southwest of Montreal, over the middle of Labrador, and just off the coast in the Labrador Sea.  Behind the front was cold and snow; in front of it, rain.

Linda checked the weather back home. The 3+ inches of snow recorded overnight in Detroit, Michigan pushed the total for the season to a new record of over 94 inches.  The old record was established in 1880/81.  This has been a historic winter with records broken across much of North America.

By early afternoon the storms were gone and the day was struggling to become partly cloudy instead of all cloudy.  The temperature barely broke 60 and it was windy so it still felt like winter’s last hurrah.  Linda discovered last night that the dish soap we bought at Publix never made it into one of our grocery bags.  It happens.  We needed more toilet paper, so we headed back to Publix in the early afternoon and stopped at the customer service desk with receipt in hand.  Mary said it was “no problem, just pick up the soap and tell the cashier that Mary said it was OK.”  It was only a $0.69 item, but we appreciated that Publix took our word for it.

With our shopping taken care of we decided to drive west on US-98 about eight miles to Destin, Florida.  The closer we got to Destin the more developed the area became.  We saw a sign for a Panera at a premium outlet mall and decided to go there for lunch.  Destin is a very upscale, resorty kind of place.  We crawled through traffic, and some of the worst engineered traffic signals we have ever encountered, to get to the mall and the restaurant.

The parking lot was packed and so was the Panera.  Apparently the stormy weather had prevented the residents from getting their maximum daily dose of high-end shopping, and they were all out on Tuesday afternoon making up for lost time.  In spite of the crowd it did not take long to place our order and receive our food and it was the same good quality we have come to expect at Panera wherever we find one.  Unlike Watercolor, which seemed vibrant but relaxed when we drove through yesterday, Destin seemed crowed and almost frantic; not our kind of place.  The traffic lights were so stupidly set up I concluded that the traffic engineers must hate rich people and were using them to inconvenience them to the maximum extent possible.  Being neither wealthy nor tolerant of stupidity, we finished our lunch and got out of town.

Before returning to Live Oak Landing we drove past Topsail State Park, a former commercial RV park, and through the very upscale community of Santa Rosa Beach right on the Gulf of Mexico.   We then drove to Freeport just to check it out since Live Oak Landing has a Freeport mailing address.  It was a one intersection town without anything special to recommend it.  Been there, done that, no reason to go back.

Back at our coach we were both very tired, having had very little sleep last night, and took a nap.  Naps are a great thing.  I used to consider them a luxury, but I’m seriously considering making them a part of my daily routine.  When we finally woke up Linda made a green salad and re-heated the spicy quinoa and black bean dish from the other night.  A beautiful sunset suddenly developed and I grabbed my camera to try to get a view shots.  This kind of lighting situation really requires a tripod and the use of the high dynamic range (HDR) technique, but I did not have time for either of those, so I got what I could hand held.

Sunset at Live Oak Landing. (This photo has more image manipulation than normal.)

Sunset at Live Oak Landing. Our coach is lower right. (This photo has more image manipulation than normal because of the extremely high contrast lighting.)

Live Oak Landing has cable TV but we were able to pick up a surprising number of channels over the air (OTA).  We watched a couple of shows while I worked on blog posts.  The forecast low for early tomorrow morning was 39 degrees F, so we closed the ceiling vents and windows before we turned in for the night.

 

2014/03/17 (N) St. Patrick’s Day

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By Sunday we were not so much tired as we were relaxed and enjoying low key days with wonderful weather at the RV resort.  The temperature made it into the low 80’s and, even with the windows open and the ceiling vent fans running, it got a bit warmer than that in the coach.  No matter; it was a relatively light day for RVillage website interactions and e-mail and we spent much of the day sitting outside reading.  We can only sit for so long at a time, however, so we went for a few walks and raked some leaves using a rake we borrowed from John next door.

Between 5:50 PM and 7:05 PM we got six e-mails from our whole house generator.  The first three let us know that the utility power had failed and the generator was running and supplying power to the house.  The last three let us know that utility power had been restored, that the generator was no longer supplying power to the house, and finally that the generator had shut down in an orderly fashion and was back in stand-by mode.  Sweet.  With sub-zero winter temperatures giving way to highs in the 40’s and above over the next five weeks we cannot afford to be without heat or a sump pump, both of which depend on electrical power.  Ditto for the AT&T Internet gateway that allows us to remotely monitor and control the whole-house generator and WiFi thermostat.  Technology really is cool when it works.

Williston Crossings RV Resort had a St. Patrick’s Day dinner (a day early) but we did not go, the menu having little-to-nothing we could eat.  The day was feeling a bit summery, so we had veggie burgers with cold green bean kale salad and fresh strawberries for dessert.  At dusk John and Ali decided to have a small campfire at their site next door and we joined them along with neighbors Doug and Paulette (from North Bay, ON) and Jim (“Sonny Fox”).  Glasses of white wine in hand we had our version of a “cocktail party” here at Williston Crossings.  Our bus conversion notwithstanding, we are still “campers” at heart and love to sit around a campfire in the evening.

Rain was forecast for overnight and through the next day, so we closed up the rig before turning in for the night.  The radar showed a heavy band of showers training slightly north of east off the Gulf and slowly drifting south over time towards our part of north central Florida.  We got the first raindrops sometime after midnight and by 4 AM had a full blown thunderstorm in progress.  Awake or asleep we are always aware of, and in close contact with, the weather when we are living in the bus and do not sleep as well as on calmer nights.

St. Patrick’s Day dawned wet and overcast with no discernible sunrise; just a gradual, slight lightening of the sky.  The clouds remained thick and dark all day and the rain was almost continuous until mid-afternoon, with torrential downpours at times, so we hunkered down and worked on computer-based tasks and did some reading.  By late afternoon the rain stopped but a heavy cloud layer continued to move over us from the southwest and the high temperature only reached 67 degrees F.

Soup (or stew) is always a welcome counterpoint to a cool, dreary day.  Linda found a recipe for kale, white bean, and potato stew.  The base was onions, carrots, and celery.  She used black beans instead of white, russet potatoes instead of Yukon Gold, and substituted balsamic vinegar for red wine vinegar.  She cut back on the quantity of water and ended up with a delicious, hearty soup.

We got a short walk in after dinner before the rain resumed around 8:00 PM.  PBS has been fund-raising for what seems like weeks now.  In recognition of St. Patrick’s Day they aired a concert by Celtic Women, followed by a concert by Judy Collins, all of which provided some entertainment for the evening.  Thunderstorms were again forecast for the early morning hours, but Tuesday promised clearer weather.