I took a vacation to Greece with my long-time girlfriend. The weather report that morning said they were expecting partly cloudy skies and isolated rain showers, so we just decided to meander through the oceanfront shops, darting inside if things got wet.
A break in the clouds came, and we went to the port to just look out on the ocean and enjoy a little “us time”. We were talking and laughing about minor stuff and took a moment (or several) to kiss.
When the kiss ended, a flash caught my attention. I turned out toward the water and saw some strange and very colorful lightning strikes on the open sea. They were in multiple colors — something I have never seen before. Some were red, some were purple, some were yellow, some were green, etc.
On the land, it suddenly became very calm: no wind, just dead still. But what had been light and some slightly darker clouds had very abruptly turned black as night.
I’m no weather expert, but when the skies do things you’ve never seen before, that’s usually a sign to relocate. Deciding surviving was the better part of valor, we hurried back to the car and drove away from the shore.
We decided to take just a few minutes to stop at a supermarket to get a few small things. We figured we were ahead of the storm enough to grab local snacks and spend the rest of the day snug and warm at the hotel. The skies were still blue above us when we jogged inside, so we figured fifteen minutes was a harmless span of time.
When we exited the supermarket, a wind started blowing and a slight rain started pouring. We hurried to the car and aimed for the hotel, still figuring we were okay and that we just needed to get there and be done with the day. Maybe we’d admit that we shouldn’t have stopped if we wanted to avoid getting soaked, shrug, and make a mental note for next time. The weather reports just said “rain showers”. The local people lived in a Mediterranean climate; surely they knew about the weather around here and their weather channel would have given us a severe weather warning? Surely.
Only two streets down, with the hotel literally in sight, the storm hit, and it hit hard!
I could barely drive due to the amount of water that was flooding the roads within seconds. The wind went from blowing to roaring like a tornado. Trees literally shredded and branches took flight. Suddenly, a metal table hit my car from the back, breaking the back window. My girlfriend screamed, and I’m pretty sure I was inventing new four-letter words as the interior of the car got soaked and my girlfriend’s hair started whipping around. Then, a large pot took flight lessons. I bless every engineer who built that vehicle because it had a reinforced windshield. The pot hit the driver’s side right about level with my face and wrecked the glass, but it didn’t shatter it.
I remembered what the street looked like and started driving by heart; the clouds had turned the afternoon into midnight and none of the buildings or streetlights were lit, which meant the power had been knocked out. I managed to turn into a garage, and we took refuge there along with several other vehicles that had gotten the same idea.
The storm raged for fifteen minutes, with random objects (including a street barricade or two) being flung in to join us. Everyone looked shellshocked inside their vehicles, lit only by headlights and interior vehicle lights. Just twenty minutes before, it had been 32C (a bit below 90F) outside with a clear sky. Now we were experiencing what felt like a hurricane, but literally, no one had gotten a warning from the forecast.
When everything calmed down, people started to get out of their cars and approach other vehicles’ windows with first aid kits to see if everyone was all right.
We later learned that a freak squall — a sudden, sharp increase in wind speed — had formed off the coast due to the very warm day and the cooling showers. It had dragged the rain along with it and had just gone crazy in the local area.
My girlfriend (now wife) was all right, as was I, other than being shaken, wet, and frazzled. Oh, and yeah, the car was totaled, but thankfully, the place we rented it from didn’t hold us responsible.
It just goes to show you how unpredictable weather can be, despite the best efforts of the experts.
