Oh no, no, no

What a day!  We left late from Amarillo for Albuquerque.  It's a fairly short trip and we were gaining an hour.  Karen has put some serious mileage in over the last few days, so it was a bit of a break for her and it gave Jan and I time to walk.  Beautiful morning, with a slight chance of thunderstorms for our easy trip to Albuquerque.  Nice, huh?

Well after we got into New Mexico, the sky ahead was starting to look a little ominous.  Black and we could see bits of lightning.  We pulled into a rest area to take a look at the radar and saw a small line, one storm really sitting right across our route.  We commented that it looked like we were in store for some heavy rain, but it would be short lived as it was quite narrow. No big deal.

So off we went, got darker and darker, and the drops started to hit the windshield.  Then harder and harder as the hail started.  But just small hail, only a 1/4 inch maybe, slowed down a little, no big deal it will be over in just a couple miles.  Then the hail came in ernest, bigger and bigger until quite a few were approaching golf ball size!  It was like we were under attack!  We pulled over and stopped along with tons of other cars and trucks. We actually felt if we kept going it would come through the windshield.  It was scary and deafening, sounded like some one was on the roof with a hammer just wailing away!  We cringed at every impact, Karen even said she wanted to crawl under the bed!  We had never experienced anything like it.

It finally started to let up, so we got back on the road and in just a few miles, we were back in sunlight.  We had to go about 30 miles to get to a rest area, and Karen in the back said she didn't see any pieces falling off our motorhome so we pressed on.  Pulled into the rest area to see what we would see.  Our new truck had several big dents in the hood, but the canoe on the roof protected it for the most part, but oh no, not Karen's new truck.  It was peppered with dents!  Everywhere, hood, roof, even side panels!  We were crying by now.  Walked around the motorhomes and didn't see any damage, but until we got to the campground we weren't going on the roofs.

We get to Albuquerque, work ourselves into pigeonhole sites and up we go expecting the worst.  We each have clear acrylic domes over our showers, expensive, hard to find, and difficult to repair or install, along with plastic covers on our AC units, and plastic covers on our fans to say nothing about the fiberglass roof itself.  So it was with much trepidation that we peered over the edge.  Again we lucked out, as you know we have all 3 new AC units with a much tougher covers, and amazingly we could not find anything amiss on our roof!  But, oh man, looking over at Karen's it was apparent that at least 2 of her 3 AC's had taken a lot of damage!  She crawled up and sure enough all 3 of her AC covers were destroyed!  But even with that, we really lucked out that the domes were unscathed.  So we have both been in contact with our insurance companies and are awaiting information to see where we go from here.  As we were outside talking in front of our coach, Karen noticed that inside one of our headlight recesses, we had taken a damaging blow and had a hole where one chunk of hail must have caught the fiberglass just right.  We'll try to patch that up ourselves until we have an opportunity to really fix it this winter.

So we are here now visiting family, eating great food, and trying to forget this little adventure.  The fact we are on the move with a tight schedule and a hard ferry date is going to be challenging to see what we will do.  At least other than looking horrible, our trucks run fine, and I think both of us would rather just wait until we get back from Alaska to get the trucks fixed or whatever they are going to do.  WOW, huh?

And no we still haven't paid for the tires.