A Very Windy Day!

High lake winds

Whitecaps on Kentucky Lake near Fenton, KY

I drove over to Murray, KY, yesterday so I could go with Keely to the Cingular store. Instead of putting a new SIM card in her old phone, they wanted her to buy a new plan and get a "free" phone.  The plan owner had to be present, they claimed, if they were going to replace the card.

So I presented myself and it took the Cingular employee approximately five minutes to transfer the information from the old card and insert the new card.

The wind was ferocious making the trip less pleasant than it should have been. My crossing of the two big bridges at the edges of Land Between the Lakes (LBL) was almost frightening. Counting the approaches, each bridge span is about a mile long.  The wind builds up speed across the broad expanse of open lake water and hits the bridges with tremendous force.

The two bridges are narrow, and in the gusty wind, hugging the rail was more challenging than usual. I counted myself lucky that I went over the first bridge without meeting a single oncoming car. However, I met plenty of traffic on the  three other bridge crossings of my trip.

Coming across one of the bridges, I saw two large raptors in the air nearby. They were trying to fly against the wind but they were hardly holding their position against the buffeting blast of air. Their size and their silhouette in flight made me wonder if they might be bald or golden eagles, both of which are found at LBL. I didn't observe them carefully because I was busy holding my car steady.

The lakes were covered with whitecaps as you can see in the photo above, and when I stopped to snap this photo at the lake's edge, the wind whipped my hair back like a flag in a hurricane. I faced the other way to take some photos of the lake's edge, and the wind whipped my hair over my face so violently that I couldn't even see through the camera's lens.

While I was walking back to the car with the wind at my back,  I felt it lifting me up and moving me along. I haven't felt that sensation for years. I'm usually quite wind-stable!

That flash of physical memory brought to mind a fairy tale that I read when I was a child: At the Back of the North Wind, in which the boy, Diamond, rides with Lady North Wind. (If you've never read it, it can be downloaded for free or read online at Gutenberg.org.)

The wind is blowing strongly again today. I read in the weather report that we're going to get some cold weather behind it with night temperatures in the low 20's.