2013 Hills Alive

This year for Hill Alive we kind of did our own thing. It was so nice not to have to be stuck there all day. And the weather was (mostly) gorgeous. Usually Hills Alive is 100 degrees and terrible. This year was unseasonably cool with upper 70s and lower 80s. Beautiful. And that was fortunate since even baby 7 week old Ezra came along.

After we watched For King and Country (we really enjoyed them), we spent a couple hours at the bouncy castles for the kids. Then we went to get some balloon animals. The workers were talking about a big hail storm coming. Terry was not about to get out of line and listen to the kids whiny annoying complaints. So they got their balloon animals and we had just enough time to run for shelter under a big cottonwood tree. Thankfully, the people in the tent next to the tree pulled us under with them. Just in time too because Evie got smoked on the shoulder with a hail stone. She didn't even end up with a bruise, but she freaked out. The storm started out with just marble size hail but it grew in size...

Our view of the storm from under the tent.

When the storm was almost over, the clouds started dropping some wallops. I'd never seen golf ball size hail before. They looked like they'd been frozen twice. Scary stuff. We joked that someone on stage said something blasphemous so God sent the hail. 

In the parking lot, our van received very little damage. Just some dings to the roof that are kinda hard to see. When we got home a half hour after the storm passed, our lawn still had a ton of hail on it.

These were some of the larger hailstones we could find. And this was after they'd melted a while!

The big stones even left divots in the lawn. Most impressive.