I turned on the my phone last night as the plane was landing. A message from my daughter was waiting saying: stay at the airport! I wasn’t sure what that meant. It seems baseball sized hail was moving through north Austin, heading for the airport. The landing was a bit rough but everything looked fine at the airport. Except there wasn’t a gate available. Really? It’s after 9pm and I know they knew we were coming. Only waited 15 minutes on the tarmac but it made me nervous. No announcements about the weather from the crew.

We had come from a short trip to visit Mom in New Orleans. We joke when we booked it that a hurricane would probably hit while we were there. Something always seems to disturb our travels to visit family. Actually our daughter was supposed to come with us, but she picked up COVID just before we left and wasn’t able to travel with us. Maybe good luck for us. She was the only thing that kept us from getting on the road and driving right into this storm.

There were no warnings and no news at the airport. We hunkered down for about two hours, as heavy rain and light hail moved through. Texted our neighbors and they said our neighborhood was getting golfball sized hail. Plugged in our phones since watching weather radar had run down our batteries. We made it home before midnight to no serious damage to the house that we could see, just leaves stripped off of the trees covering the road and the yard. Oddly, the pool was overflowing. It looks like hail must have hit the butterfly valve on the side of the house that turns on the refill water. Glad we caught that.