It's been ridiculously gorgeous here in Seattle--eighties, sunny--until Wednesday when there was a huge thunderstorm. We don't have thunderstorms in Seattle, so all that lightening and hard rain surprised us. And it was predicted to happen again all day Friday, hiking day.

I have been insisting that we were going hiking today for several weeks, and David was having fits about it. I had put my foot down. We had convinced several friends to go with us, and I did not want to dump all the plans for a weather report. They can change right?

The weather report did change: 90% chance of thunderstorms, 40%, thunderstorms in other regions but not the Puget Sound. . . Then there were some really loud thunderstorms in the middle of the night, and I was like, what was I thinking? hiking in that is nuts! But this morning, the weather report said the thunderstorms were going to hold off until 1:00. I convinced my friends to do an in town hike with me at Discovery Park, and off we went under gray skies.

By this time, by the way, David had completely committed to the hike and was really upset when I considered cancelling.

We had a fabulous time. It was me, David, and mom, two other moms, and four other kids, a nice spread of boys and girls. The hike is 4 miles on basically paved roads. It has one steep part, lots of ripe blackberries, and then the huge sweep of beach. The kids could have spent all day at the beach building forts and investigating the very low tide, but we told them we had to leave by 12:10 to get back before the 1:00 storm. (I kept wanting to say "We better get going if we're going to stay ahead of the weather.") Like the weather report was going to be that accurate.

Walking back the clouds massed, the lightening started, the thunder followed close after, uncomfortably close after, at 12:50 we felt the first drops. But by 1:10 when the rain was pounding down, we were comfortably back in the car.

It was a great hike.