We’ve had some storms, which included thunder and lightening for the first time. The lightening wasn’t as impressive as I hoped, as I had thought we may see it over the sea, but we did see the sky lighten but no actual lightening. We have also seen a lot of rainbows as the sun broke through the storms!
The rain didn’t feel particularly heavy – but it was consistent, and where Ian dug out the drainage down the side of the front garden really helped. The gutter at the front of the house is dipping the wrong way, which means that rain from the roof goes into the garden rather than down the drainpipe which goes under the garden into the street, so that doesn’t help!
There was also some hail, and not wanting to be an Extremaduran bore, these were extremely small hailstones and not like the fist-sized, damage causing hail, we had in Extremadura! I guess we just get used to what we know, however having been a few weeks away from Extremadura now, I can really appreciate the extremes we used to see.
It snowed at higher levels too but the snow was at 500 meters, so relatively high up (I think we’re at 20 meters), but I imagine it would have been quite bad where we saw the snow poles when we were driving through the mountains. It still feels odd to think of 500 meters as being high up when we were at 600 meters in Villagarcia and it didn’t feel at all high!
When it was windy I hadn’t shut a window properly and the wind caught it and broke a pane of glass. The glass was broken anyway, but the wind knocked the remaining bits out. I’m not sure what we’ll do, whether we’ll just tape it up, try to replace the glass or do something else. I’m actually not too worried as one of the things we need to be aware of is we have windows upstairs which the animals could get out of when open, so I had been wondering if we could do something like remove a pain of glass and make a ‘window within a window’ to get ventilation into the house (it’s VERY surprisingly air tight), without having to worry about the animals falling out of open windows, so this sort of made the decision for us!
Maybe I’ll make a seaglass pane of glass to fill it 🙂
But although it was stormy, it wasn’t cold and there was still the strange sensation of warm winds and being warmer outside the house than in!
We currently don’t have heating in the house, although we did bring our electric heaters with us – our current electric supply isn’t strong enough to use them. The house did start to feel cold during the storms as it’s quite apparent how much the sun through the front windows warms the house. We did repair (hopefully) the wood burning stove in the kitchen, but didn’t use it during the storms as we thought we’d make things significantly worse if we lit the stove, found it was still leaking smoke and then had to open all the windows to clear the smoke!
I think the rain may have been unusual (volume) as there was quite a lot of damage in the area, including severely damaging the Burela / Foz road which is now closed, as was the road which was the alternative route – giving people an 80 minute diversion (according to the news) rather than the 10/15 minutes the trip normally takes. This is actually quite significant for people living the other side of Burela in places like Foz and Ribadeo as the main hospital is in Burela. However they are working round the clock to get it fixed because of the importance of the road (again, according to the news).
This is from the news website – however it looks like the road has cracked right across:
