As I drove north on I-35 and reached Buda, I noticed that the weather in Austin was looking worse and worse. When I got to south Austin, Jan called me and told me that there was a huge hail storm happening right at that moment at our house. She said the hail was so thick on the street, it looked like snow!
I could hear the sounds of the hail hitting the roof and patio, and asked Jan to run get the camera and take some photos. She was a little intimidated by the rig, but I told her to set it to auto, turn it on, point and shoot.
I think she did a pretty great job of capturing the moment! She scooped up some of the larger hailstones and put them in a ziplock bag in the freezer for me to see. Some were half-dollar size in diameter. Pretty impressive.
That night on the news, KXAN I believe it was, the meteorologist told about the "strange coincidence" of hail storms on March 25th. He said that in the years 1993 and in 2001, similar large hailstorms had hit Austin, and caused large amounts of damage to autos and roof shingles each time. He showed videos of previous hail storms and hailstones from the video archives. Pretty cool, I thought.
More later, thanks for stopping by.
Mike Z
PS - in searching around Google and Yahoo! I found this post by Treye Rice with a great shot of the hailstones around the tree in his front yard. He also has some great photos of the same sunsets I tried to capture on another post.
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