Rain Stopped Play

 I know many of you must never have heard the title phrase before what with global warming and all that but every now and again mother nature decides to water the plants.

More of that later because earlier in the day I called in a new to me café near the level crossing.

The café is called A-ME and it is a lovely little place with nice staff and rather good coffee.

So what about the "rain stopped play" line?

Well, I had a plan...

I rather fancied a trip to the Stinky canal to try and snap the sunset there so loaded with 2 phones and a selfie stick as a mini tripod off I set but when leaving I noticed that the clouds in the direction of my travel, were looking a tad dark and threatening. So I  grabbed the brolly, after all a little rain is fine as long as the brolly holds up... Isn't it😕

The problem was that even before the rain arrived the wind was so strong that the brolly was darn near impossible to control and it wasn't making some of my intended snaps any easier.

I wanted to take some pictures of the incredible baskets woven by the weaver birds close to home but how do you get a clear shot when they are swaying about at a rate of knots and you yourself are being buffeted by strong gusts.

This is about as good as I could manage yesterday on the walk.

A trip to take pictures of them in better conditions will be undertaken I am sure.

Once the rain arrived it was simple not possible to stay dry, the swirling wind blew it in from all directions and as I found out, the brolly was, shall we say, not quite waterproof😬.

I had to take shelter whilst the heaviest downpour lashed the area and wait for a bit of respite.

Then there was the task of crossing superhighway 11.

This is a 4 carriageway road with between 2 and 4 lanes on each carriageway. As long as visibility is OK and you are patient enough to wait for a suitable gap in the traffic it is not too much of a challenge to cross.

But when your and the drivers visibility is severely degraded by rain and spray, it is quite a challenge and it took quite a few minutes waiting for safe enough gaps to get across each carriageway.

The rain continued and so did I but I confess that on more than one occasion I thought of taking shelter again and booking a ride into the city. But at about 3.5km I could see the skies were definitely getting less threatening and by 4km the rain had stopped.

I was able to put the brolly down and believe it or not as I walked the last couple of km I dried out, not totally dry but to a sort of tolerable damp.

I even saw a glimpse of blue sky when I arrived at the Iron bridge.

With the delays and the weather I had already routed away from the stinky canal so that will have to wait for another day.

Instead it was the Red Lion for the MotoGP sprint, some Old Speckled Hen and...

If you are wondering where the Relive videos are, I have decided to try the blog without it and gauge the reaction so please let me know if the blog is better like this or if you prefer the Relive embedded. If you do want to see the Relives they are online HERE .

And now it is time for a brew.

Coffee.