Five Minute Friday - 7/9/18 - Rain

Well I've only joined in with this a couple of times and that was a long time ago but I'm determined to blog more regularly so this seemed a good bloghop to get back into.

If you want the full details of how this works click here

The main idea though as you've probably guessed is just to write for 5 minutes on the prompt which today is RAIN (and if you want to check out other posts click here)

This is my attempt:

When I think of rain I often think of a summer holiday we spent on the west coast of France.  We were camping with one of hubby’s sisters and her family and the weather had been lovely.

One afternoon I noticed that many of the French campers were digging trenches around their tents.  We didn’t know why but they were very intent on this.

I insisted that we needed a trench too.  Hubby was not so keen, especially as we did not have a proper spade like the seasoned French campers did – just a small child’s spade.  Watching him trying to complete the trench was quite interesting!

However, later that afternoon we began to understand.  Suddenly the wind came up from nowhere and before we knew it we were in the middle of a terrifying storm which lasted well into the night.   

We were so glad we’d dug a trench although we were still frantically moving everything into the middle of our groundsheet and lifting up the edges to keep things dry.  Thankfully the bedroom areas had built in groundsheets so that was okay but it was very scary.  We were hanging on to the sides of the tent to stop it blowing away.

The rain came in torrents and with it hailstones the size of golf balls.  Evidence of these was visible in the form of small dents on cars the next morning.  The lightening was also amazing and took out a tree at the bottom of the site.

It didn’t put me off camping but made me think more carefully about what we packed and how we stored things in the tent.

Image courtesy of Pinterest