Whee!

Tiffany and I were enjoying a nice nice cup of french onion soup, just now. It was our dinner, and we were just enjoying the parisian evening, watching some clouds roll in. Then off in the distance... Lightning! I LOVE thunderstorms! Warm rain is the greatest! So I was pretty excited. The lightning was still pretty far away, so I was kind of antsy to get out there and try to take some pictures of it, but the waiter was really busy and couldn't get the check to us very quickly. In hindsight... that was a very good thing.

By the time that we left the cafe, I thought the storm was a little closer, and now coming in from the south and west. Before it was just south. So I took the opportunity to try to take pictures of lightning! I've always liked trying to play around with long exposures, but I'm not very good at it, and never really had a digital camera that did it. So I was excited! I got a couple of good bolts.

This one is probably the best, if you zoom in you can see a few more bolts in the picture off the main bolt. You might also notice the impending grey doom around the bolt too. I told Tiff that we should start making our way for safer cover, since lightning was to the north of us now, which meant it was all around, and I didn't particularly like being surrounded by lightning. And for once, I was the safety conscious one, because Tiffany wanted to stay out for a little longer. It was amazing watching the lightning over the Louvre, and it wasn't raining very hard. It was just sprinkling big drops. But I talked her into moving, and we started moving. We were only a half block away from the cafe, a block away from the hotel. Across from the Louvre is a carnival, with a giant ferris wheel. Our hotel is on the street that ends at the ferris wheel, so we went to the ferris wheel to go back to the hotel. Thats when things got REALLY fun! A giant dust cloud got kicked up from this huge blast of wind that came from literally nowhere. It was calm and quiet, then BAM! Dust and sand in our eyes and mouth. We couldn't cross the street because we were kinda blind. I could hear people screaming on the ferris wheel. Then the skies opened up with a torrent of rain and hail the size nickles started falling. We were getting soaked, and I dragged Tiffany across the street because she didn't want to cross because of traffic. A moped almost hit us, but we made it across fine. But the rain was pouring down, and we needed cover. Someone had opened up there receiving area of an apartment building, where all the mailboxes are, and we got in with a bunch of other people.

Everything happened really quickly. So quickly that I forgot to switch the autofocus back on on the camera, so its focus was set for a distance, and so Tiff is all fuzzy here, but you can get an idea of how wet we got, being out in the rain for about 4 minutes. We were really soaked. Finally, things calmed down outside after about 10 minutes, so we went out and made it back to our apartment. There we met an indian family who we saw at breakfest earlier today. They told us they were on the ferris wheel (which was turned off by the time we left our vestibule). Their older son had his glasses blown off of his face. Their younger son kept repeating that he was sure that he was going to die!
But thankfully, nobody got hurt, and it was a lot of fun! Woo! I'm all jazzed up now, unfortunately. We need to sleep, since we'll be up early tomorrow for a tour of versailles. Hopefully it'll be much better than our tour of pompeii.

Au Revoir!

p.s. Tiffany says she's perfectly fine. Really!