BootsnAll Travel Network



Thunderbolts and lightning…

…very, very frightening!

For some time the sky had been streaked with orange strobing like a dancing reflection of city lights in the gray cloud blanket. We were rushing down the motorway towards home, rapidly passing through London’s thinning suburbs and past Heathrow Airport; but the lights on the ground were stationary. And where had all the stars gone?

As we turned our back on the bright lights of the airport, the darkness ahead flickered away suddenly, freezing the surrounding landscape for an instant in time. Now it was the shadows that were strobing as the entire sky lit up, pulsating and raging, occasionally concentrating its fury in jagged arrows that ripped through the cloud and seemed to strike right into the heart of the earth, leaving illuminated sutures on our retinas. We drove into a wall of humid, sweltering air. A flash of lightning passed horizontally over our heads, stitching the blanket of clouds from right to left. And then the rain hit.

Within moments, the motorway turned into a ribbon of water, reflecting the lightning above and the lights of the oncoming cars from below. We were swimming in a river of light, the tyres almost floating on the tarmac—all the cars slowed down to a crawl by the hand of nature.

With each new lightning flash I felt electricity pricking at my skin and grabbing at my intestines. The very air was bristling with electrical charge.

“Yeehaa!” John shouted over the bedlam: “I have never felt so alive!”

I cowered in my seat as we turned into a narrow, winding lane. The roadside vegetation closed in like a tunnel, shadows chasing each other in the lightning both distant and close. Just as I thought we had left the heart of the storm behind, a massive bolt cracked into the fields next to us, briefly outlining the silhouettes of shrubs and trees and the skeletons of fence-posts. Surely the car was a Faraday Cage and we would be safe as long as we didn’t touch the metal—would we?

The rain lessened as we approached the final roundabout. A massive lorry in the neighbouring lane suddenly pulled to a stop, several yards short. In the lights of the behemoth we spotted a rabbit, cowering close to the tarmac with the water cursing around its ankles, its eyes closed against the horrors that surrounded it. It sat there for several seconds until it finally hopped off and the giant lorry gently started to roll again.

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