Jan 29 '08:

We had some business about 100 miles north of here today. We head out and it's 57 degrees. A couple of hours later we get to where we're going and it's like spring, when we got there the temperature was almost 70. Slight breeze, absolutely "spring training weather". Bear in mind this is near St. Louis, and it's late January.

It took a little longer than we planned on (the sign in procedure had gone computerized- so we sign in on their 'puters, tells us it's a 54 minute wait. OK. About an hour later I went to check the wait time and it says we'd never signed in.) Lovely, so we had sat there for nothing for over an an hour and wound up behind an hour more worth of people.   

So we leave there later than we expected and take I-64 part of the way home. I look in the rear view mirror and here comes a semi just spraying the road like crazy. At first I thought it was a tanker with a leak, but as he got closer it was a regular semi. So we're thinking where has he been.... Temperature is about 61 at this point.

We get off of I-64 and pull into a gas station, the sky looks like the end of the world in one direction, and is clear with a rainbow in another. I'm pumping gas, rain starts coming down and gets blown horizontal by a wind that kicks in. People that work at the gas mart come running out to get the garbage cans so they don't blow away. My wife was inside, and one of the guys from the station went back in and told her, "the heck with those cans, I can replace them, I can't replace me."

By the time I fill up I'm soaked. I pull the car up to a parking spot and go inside and notice that the temperature gauge on the dash now reads 40!

While this is going on, we had the radio on a Catholic station and it's broadcasting a continuous Hail Mary!

With a temperature drop like that we're thinking "Oh boy" (twister) but luckily that didn't happen. We're wondering whether to sit it out for awhile and decide to head home. We're pulling out and the guy from the station comes running out, cell phone in hand, and says, "You said you were heading south....Debbie is on the phone and says there are severe storm warnings and a tornado watch for that area..."

So we head home anyway (now it's close to 3:00 p.m. and we''re thinking, "Storm, or risk the dark and Bambi on the road...") It's obvious it had been raining (where we had been was bone dry all day).

When we get to the town the guy had told us the weather warnings were for, it looked like it had snowed!, but a closer look showed that it was all ice balls and there had been a hail storm. We leave that town and continue south and there's no hail or anything at all, it was like there was a barrage of hail just on that town.