Thursday afternoon we were getting some gas for a quick trip down to North Carolina.
After stopping at Sheetz we swung on to Electric Road and pulled into Salem's riverside park which is just before you head up the hill towards Lewis-Gale.
Though it was raining too much to get a picture exactly like the one in my post, "The river barely runs through it," there is no that there is lots more water in the Roanoke River.
We drove across North Carolina last evening. In fact we went right through some of the most drought stricken areas. It was great to see steady rain and a little tint of green in areas which had been devoid of color.
The Raleigh paper has an article, "Rain provides relief; water crisis lingers," which says most areas got a couple of inches of rain.
We crossed some pretty swollen streams as we descended from Virginia into North Carolina. There is plenty of room for that water in the downstream reservoirs.
We drive over the Haw River on our 5.5 hour journey to NC's Southern Outer Banks. On Monday when we passed over the river it was just puddles. Last night, just four days later, there was water running in it. That is definitely a good sign.
As we swung down along the coast and passed through Swansboro just a few miles from our place, the skies opened up. When we came across the White Oak River it was raining so hard that we could hardly see. That is only two or three miles from our home depending on whether you go by boat or car.
When our checked our rain gauge at our home on the White Oak, it showed about 1.5 inches of rain which means the rain didn't start until just before we got home. It was pouring so hard we had to wait a few minutes to unload.
Since it started raining the day after we got to Roanoke and rained on us all across North Carolina and poured as we got back to our coastal home not far from Emerald Isle, I'm going to declare us rainmakers.
In fact it my memory serves me correctly, once we bought our house in Roanoke in 1989, it couldn't stop raining. I think we crushed the drought of 1988.
Today is the big day for Apple lovers, money will be raining on Cupertino. I celebrated by buying a Windows Vista HP laptop from Staples. I still use my Macs, I just couldn't see paying double for a new laptop that I needed.
There were other "rainmakers" around last night.
We did make it home in time last night to see the second half of the Va. Tech-Boston College game. We could have stopped for dinner and still seen all we needed to see.
Yesterday before we got on the road, I wrote a post, "The Game," on the Blacksburg Web Villages site.
In it I explained why previous ties to Boston made pulling for Va Tech not a simple or automatic decision for me.
On the long drive down, I had decided to cheer for Boston College. After watching a few minutes of the game, I thought that my rainmaking might have jinxed them, but in the end they turned in a remarkable comeback very similar to the Harvard-Yale one that I wrote about in my The Game post.
Instead of being just a bunch of football characters, I think Boston College showed some real character in not giving up. While it was obvious the TV announcers had given up on them, they hadn't given up on themselves.
It is one of those times, that it was fortunate that they were listening to their leaders and themselves instead of what technology or television could deliver to them.
Matt Ryan obviously showed some great leadership.
Maybe I'm crazy but I think a lot of success comes from failure or near failure and the ability to overcome it.
Boston College should be in good shape for their next challenge. We'll have to see how Va. Tech responds. In the end, it is still just a game which unfortunately has a lot of money attached to it. I suspect we'll be seeing Matt Ryan on a lot of Sundays in the future.
Whatever happens with college football, it is nice to not be worrying about the mountains catching on fire this fall. For that and the rain which came in the last fews days, I am very thankful.
I'm also thankful to not being reading the Roanoke Times this morning and all the articles about last night's game.
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