Hello, Lee.

Well, I thought we've had enough natural disasters in one week here in Philly.  I thought wrong.

Every day I go walking with some friends down to the river.  It is just south of our building a little ways, and is a very nice walk.  Pardon the glarey picture (its all google maps could give me), but this is usually what it looks like where the trail starts.  If you can't tell, the river is on the left of the road at the bottom of the hill.  Today, however, was a different story.  It has been really rainy all week long.  It rained a few days before Irene showed up, a few days after, then by the time we got through that, hurricane Lee came along to distribute its wet goodness to us as well.  Last night we had the biggest thunderstorm I have ever seen.  Our whole building was shaking for about an hour last night from thunder as the storm passed.  The thunder was just cracking off the walls of the buildings, and I've gotta admit, it was pretty crazy. Soooo so loud.


Then this morning, it took JD two hours to get to school (normally a 15 minute drive).  Roads were backed up like CRAZY. We didn't know what was going on.  I turned on the news and there are freeways and roads shut down all over Philadelphia because of flooding. I mean, BIG freeways, and LOTS of side-roads.  They even shut down public transit in many areas because water made the roads completely impassable.  Every road that WAS open, was completely jam-packed.  It was still that way at 9 when I went outside to go walking.  Crazy.

So we walk down to the river this morning, and we are passing all kinds of debris on the road.  Rocks, branches, mud, big piles of just.. debris.  It looked like there had been a lot of water running down that road over-night.  But we kept walking.  We'd just go as far as we could, then come back.  I figured that the river would be running pretty high because of all the rain.  Usually it is pretty low, and there's quite a good-sized wall along the whole river, too so I wasn't too worried.  We got to the trail, and we saw this:

Again, sorry for the picture.  This one is from my crappy phone.  If you look at the first picture, you can see how far down the ground is from the edge of the wall on the right.  The water was SO HIGH!  I couldn't believe it!  I've never seen flooding before, and this was nuts.  Notice that the sign is almost completely under water.  I bet the blue sign is usually a good 6 feet from the ground.  And the river is a lot lower than where the  trail is.  Anyway, I'm ready for this rain (and these natural disasters) to stop!  I promise, I'll never complain about the humidity again!  (Okay, that's a lie).  But I would try really hard!