The Great Deluge

Yesterday, as usual, I did a training ride in the afternoon. Going out, I should have taken the extremely dark clouds over the mountains as warning of things to come. However, I tend to get lucky with rain, so I decided to push my luck once again. I made it through about three quarters of my ride before the typical windstorm-before-the-rainstorm kicked up. Anyone familiar with this phenomenon knows that when the wind kicks up, you'd better find shelter, FAST. I, however, was in the middle of my last sprint interval of the ride, and am known to prefer to finish my ride in bad weather than to run and hide. So, down came the rain with hurricane force. I could only look a few feet in front of my front wheel, because if I lifted my head any higher, the rain, with the force it was falling, would have surely caused damage to my eyes. There were short periods where the rain on my exposed skin felt like hail, though I never did see the little tell-tail chunks of ice on the ground. A good 15 minutes or so into the storm, cars were starting to pull over to the side of the road because they couldn't see far enough ahead, and the streets were flooding. Then along came an excessively hard gust of wind (probably lasting a minute or so) which caused the rain to hit me as if I were in a sand blaster. I was at the verge of screaming out in pain, but knew of a bike path tunnel near by, and made a bee-line for it. Sweet relief! Here, I waited for the wind to die down, which it did shortly. The quantity of rain was still there, but the sheer pressure of it was gone. The slog home was just that, riding through torrents of water that once were sidewalks and bike lanes. I finally made it home, quite possibly the soggiest I've ever been, though surprisingly not too cold, as it is still summer (ask me nicely, and maybe I'll tell you about the time I got caught out in a blizzard on that same stretch of road--now that was COLD).
Things could have been worse. About half an hour after I got home, massive thunder and lightning erupted. I was reminded of a few tropical thunder storms I'd experienced growing up in Hawaii. I'm talking about the level of thunder were you start to question the structural soundness of your house, and whether you should be by a window in case it should shatter.
This was definitely a once-in-a-very-long-while kind of storm, and I was "lucky" enough to experience it first hand. Nature is wondrous in both her beauty and her fury.