Flooding in West Texas!

While periodic short rain/thunder storms (with hail) are normal here in west Texas, the days prior to July 4th were a very different story. In the period of one afternoon we received over 8 inches! Many places received 9, 12 and even 13 inches. While this type of rainfall was taken in stride when we lived near Mobile, Al, it is a totally different story here in west Texas. With only 3 inches of rain, many streets are flooded and deemed impassable so, you can imagine the road conditions with such large amounts of water just standing - because it does not run off very fast.

The pictures below are taken from the end of our driveway looking west. As you can see, the road is impassable.

At the intersection (just before the water begins at the bottom of the hill) you would turn right and go about a 1/2 mile to our vineyard. The road to the vineyard was washed out with deep gullies. Needless to say, we did not drive our 15 passenger van to the vineyard until the county graded it!

Country living is great - when it rains you get to stay home! With all the rain, we were unable to work in the vineyard and had a couple of days off! We had the unexpected pleasure of homemade chocolate chip cookies (recipe multiplied by 4 giving plenty to eat and still plenty to freeze!) and homemade doughnuts ... We had to get back to the vineyard just to work off the extra weight we gained!

We don't normally stack them so high but this is more space and platter efficient!

(They didn't last long either!)