Tuesday July 30th 2024

The weather surprised me again today. Leading up to mid morning every forecast I saw or heard called for no rain to only a very small chance. Then everything started to change. The online forecasts and the noon TV forecasts suddenly had a 40% chance of rain from 5PM to 10PM. That wasn’t the end of the surprises. Thunder storms in this area of Florida can come from any direction. In most areas of the country, severe weather usually comes from one or two directions, mostly west and south. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen storms here come from the all points of the compass except the northwest. Tonight around 6PM a very heavy storm arrived from the northwest. The sound of rain on my roof along with the lightening and thunder were very dramatic.

Today’s issue was a multitude of traffic jams. While out touring this afternoon I ran into heavy traffic that was probably the result of an accident ahead. I decided to take a much longer detour, but that didn’t work. A few miles along my new route I found more stop and go traffic. This time it looked more like “get out of work” traffic. Soon the “time to leave the theme park” traffic got added into the mix. Just getting home was a challenge. This area has so much new development going on that the roads just aren’t keeping up. The philosophy seems to be build housing in phase 1, build retail om phase 2 , build office buildings next and then add lanes to the access roads one at a time until traffic is tolerable. With the added lanes comes more traffic lights and awkward turning situations. Shouldn’t the roads and other infrastructure come first?

The rain kept me from getting in my usual walk around the RV park. Since the heavy storm arrived around six, it has been raining lightly most of the time. The only thing that is gone is the thunder and lightening. I managed to catch a little bit of the setting sun from the door of my RV home. It looks like it was raining off in the direction of the sunset.