Summer on the Mira

It just isn’t summer without spending some time on Mira River. I’ve talked about the Mira before. It is one of my favorite, happiest places to be.

Hubby and I went out to the Mira for a family get-together on Saturday. Sometimes when I’m there, I draw. This time, I just soaked in my surroundings, spending the majority of my time outside.

I even ignored the bugs, which isn’t an easy thing to do. Black flies and mosquitoes just LOVE me. :p No, seriously. Sure, just about everyone gets bitten, but I get targeted for some reason. Perhaps my blood is sweet. My sugar tooth is certainly big enough. :p But whatever it is, they gravitate toward me until I’m carried away by them.

This time, though, I didn’t care much. They weren’t going to stop me! Besides, during the day I only had to worry about the horse flies and hey, there’s a river for that! I just stayed in the water, forcing the jerk horse flies onto some other poor soul, probably a family member. Sorry!

In the evening a thunderstorm came through and, very reluctantly, I got out of the water to take photos of the sunset. It isn’t a great picture, but it clearly shows the outstretching at the top of the thundercloud. It was booming like crazy, too.

I tried in vain to photograph a lightning bolt, but alas, my camera hates me. Not to mention that my timing was completely off. While I was waiting for one photo to render (bulb mode is slow!), that’s the exact time a bolt would appear. Oh well. :p

The storm came across the water, leaving a fantastic mammatus overhead that I managed to capture before we were forced indoors.

I’m pretty sure it was my first time in 11 years actually seeing mammatus in Cape Breton. I saw mammatus a bunch of times in Virginia, but not here. Our storms just aren’t turbulent enough. But THIS one was. Whoa boy. LOTS of lightning and thunder, and we normally only get a few scattered cracks. Hey, we even had a tornado warning! In Cape Breton! Wild.

We left for home after the storm passed, just barely missing the fireworks that we were sure had been canceled. Doh! But, the craziness of the day didn’t end there. Shortly after arriving home another storm blew through and knocked the power out. The power outages were extensive and widespread but our particular outage area was small so we were at the bottom of the list. We were without power for 11 hours.

Such is summer life in Cape Breton. {: