April Foolery & More

I almost just ate a raisin. What a mistake.

Yesterday was one of the weirdest days I've had in a long time. It felt like the universe was playing tricks on me the whole day, which is appropriate for April 1st, I guess. I was in Burlington, Vermont (which is beautifully quaint, by the way) and the hotel was testing their fire alarm...ALL DAY. And it was LOUD. And disruptive. I had angry participants.

Then, we drove to Albany, New York (to which there is not a direct route) and had to take about 20 different "Routes" and "County Routes" and roads of the like, so basically, we were going through the most rural parts of southern Vermont and northern New York. (Something I never guessed I'd ever be doing, that's for sure.) We drove past little cabins on big lakes and, at one point, we swore we were going to die a death right out of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" because the fog was so similar to that of a horror movie, right before someone commits a fatal error and perishes forever. When entering New York across a magnificent bridge, it was so amazing with the sun shining through the clouds on the Adirondack Mountains and the icy waters and the Lake Champlain monument we were passing that we decided to stop and take some pictures. It was humid out, past 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but while we were stopping, it started to rain (with the sun out) and we caught sight of 2 gorgeous rainbows right over the lake. Really incredible.

We got back on the road and drove through the middle of nowhere (several times, in fact) and came to the mountain range during which it started to POUR. And I don't mean just a minor, brief rainfall...we couldn't even HEAR each other in our black Ford Escape. So, we stopped talking for a while because the noise was as if we were at a rock concert...our ears were even ringing afterwards. It was intense. PLUS, the fog was so dense that I could barely see our route. And by this time, we were on the Interstate, so while the road was wider and straighter than previous ones we were on, there were huge trucks and more traffic.

The entire time we were in the mountains (well, when we could hear each other), we joked that there would probably be a huge thunderstorm that night because it would just add to all the weather oddities we experienced that day. Sure enough, last night we had a thunderstorm and I had to move the car in (again) pouring rain. We had lightning, thunder...the whole works. The wind gusts were so strong that I thought someone was moving furniture in the adjacent room. I only realized it was the wind when I couldn't get to sleep and heard it whipping through the windows and tearing apart any loose pieces of the building.

Apparently, we're supposed to have 30 mph winds today, with gusts up to 60 mph.

Perfect weather for driving to Syracuse, eh?