So for the past week, weather.com has been showing that San Miguel could be in for some wet weather, but alas we have had no rain since May. For the past couple of days, the skies have been dark and broody and we have had a lot of thunder and lightening, but still no rain. Yesterday weather.com said that we had a 60% chance of thundershowers and the skies were overcast but nothing looked too threatening.
With this background information in mind, around 10a Jo Ann and I saddled up the horses for a long trail ride out towards Las Cañas over to Palo Colorado and returning through Rancho Viejo. When we left we never even considered the possibility of rain and left all of our rain gear at home. I was kicking myself at little into the ride for not bringing my camera, but we were in for a long ride and I did not want to turn around to get it.
About half way into the ride I said to Jo Ann that the skies looked threatening and maybe we should turn around. We continued to debate for a while until I was persuasive and we turned around instead of continuing on to Rancho Viejo. When we were about 40 minutes from home the rains started and I am not talking about light drizzle, we are talking about large very cold drops of rain. Within five minutes we were soaked throughout and were trying to race home as fast as we could. The real challenge for us was having to take the horses back down into the arroyo which is a drop of about three or four meters. This was going to be difficult with the heavy rains and the steep slope. The other issue that I was concerned with is that the arroyo starts flowing after about one centimeter of rain and can be gushing after about two and half.
We were lucky that we had no problems transversing the slope and the arroyo had not yet started flowing although it was starting to get very wet. We made it back to the rancho totally drenched but everyone (horses included) were calm and glad to be out of the rain. It was still pouring after turning the horses back into their stables when I remembered that we had also left all of the windows open at the house. So off I run in the rain to close up the house and wipe up all of the rain.
After cleaning up the house and changing into some dry clothes, wouldn't you know, the rains stopped almost immediately and the day started to dry out. This morning it is one of those beautiful desert mornings with everything clean, crisp and very green.
Morale of the story, everything always reverts to its mean and even the weathermen get it right once in a while. Yes I could have been more considerate of the weather, but who wants to haul around all of the rain gear if you aren't going to need it.
