The park closed at 8:00 tonight, as opposed to the usual 5:00 in the off-season. I’d just gotten off of Montu, the one coaster that I naturally had no pics of. Suddenly, some typical, rather heavy Florida rain showers start moving through. “OK,” I thought, “we’ll just wait this out. Can’t be more than a half-hour.”
…So all’s good looking west, right?
…Until this one showed up. Taken about 10 seconds after the last pic, looking north… and as luck would have it, the winds are headed south.
Folks, I’ll be honest: This thing even had me pretty nervous. Lightning every 5 seconds striking all around you, with little to no delay for the thunder to hit. We hid under the ticket booth canopy for an hour, and it was just getting worse, so we were just about to run for the parking tram. Bad idea. Lightning struck a rod (thankfully), literally 20 feet away. No pictures of the bolt, but taking video, I got various screen captures of the sky:
I couldn’t hear myself think over all the rain.
…The RAIN. Within the hour (around 9, just before we ran for the tram), the road flooded over the curb.
Anyway, we finally made a run for the tram, got right on, got dropped off… now came the matter of running to the car, waaaaaaaaay out in the middle of the lot. Most of the other cars had already left, so it felt like a gauntlet challenge trying to make it to the car without being struck down by God. FYI, the FLAT parking lot’s water level was past the top of my shoes by this time. Needless to say I was glad I had an extra pair of shoes for the return flight the next day.
So it took us about 45 minutes to get back to the hotel. The rain stopped instantly when we hit downtown Tampa, which was rather odd in itself, but that happens all the time in Florida. Now comes the fun part: It followed us straight across the causeway back to the hotel. It’s exactly 10:00. Literally 4 seconds after we got into our room (keep in mind it’s an open-air style hotel, which rather enhanced the lightning… again), the power went out.
Thankfully there was a roof over the walkway past our first-floor room, so now, since my mom’s nerves were totally shot, I had the brilliant idea to go get ice. (You can start yelling at me now.) 2 seconds after loading up the bucket, there was another bolt… and I sincerely believe it was directly over my head. Like I said, thank goodness for grounding wires. The force of the thunder caused me to slip on the water and fall over… THAT was fun. I can only compare it to the July 4th fireworks at Epcot… pretty much thundering you to the very core.
Before anyone asks, yes, I dropped the ice, but I went back for a refill. Hey, I was still 5 feet away from the machine!
Got back to the room for good. Power went out 10 minutes later, and 15 after that, the whole thing was over. Less than 3 hours had passed, but good Lord, it seemed longer.
So to end today’s surreal experience, I leave you with two videos of the mini-Apocalypse. Enjoy.
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