The rain in Spain falls mostly on Jerez de la Frontera

OK, once was odd, but twice is really rather strange.

Yesterday the weather in Jerez was pretty poor, in fact it was dire, with the rain ranging from heavy mist through drizzle to downpour every 20 minutes or so. By the time you went anywhere you were soaked, and the sandy soil in the Alcazar was closer to quicksand than paving material quality.

However, by the time I got to Cadiz in the early afternoon it looked as though it had never rained, the skies were clear blue and the weather was warm.

Perhaps is hadn’t rained out here?

Well today the same thing happened again, weather in Jerez very wet, weather 20 miles away in Cadiz gloriously sunny.

Thank you for the architecture

Turin is a grand city, full of arcades, piazza’s and squares.

However, on a particularly foul Friday night, I think it was the arcades that I found most interesting, or should that be useful.

It’s incredibly easy to get around the centre of Turin in a hefty downpour without getting absoultly soaked thanks to all the arcades. The only time you actually have to get wet is the short dash across a road on a green man.

Despite all the arcades it doesn’t stop the local street merchants trying to sell their wears, which tonight appeared to be exclusively umbrellas.

I can only assume that there is a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Turin which has weather appropriate items in store for the vendors (though it should be pointed out that I don’t think these are licensed by the Torinesi town fathers!) and that at some point this afternoon the cry went up, rain clouds coming, fetch the umbrellas.

Still, they appeared to be doing a brisk trade, which seamed a little pointless, given all the arcades.

An average is just that

The average rainfall in Malaga in March is just 62mm (just over 2 inches). This compares favourably with a number of other places such as Bergen in Norway which has 109mm.

However, what you never get from these figures is that you can achieve that monthly average in one sitting.

Today I was given a demonstration of this with a quite spectacular downpour in the early afternoon.

Call it an inbuilt British sense of impending rain, I had taken the decision to stop for some late lunch rather than go directly to the Picasso museum and within a few seconds of sitting down in the dry the skies absolutely opened.

It is a horribly schadenfreude thing to do, but it is quite fun to sit in the dry and watch everyone one else suddenly have to dash for cover.

Of course, it took nearly 40 minutes for the downpour to abate, which meant I just had to have a largish lunch, with some tapas, and a beer, and some coffee, and think about desert...

I might have fibbed when I was 17

But I didn’t actually Lie, so why, when I go to Bath, does it always rain on me?

Earlier this week I had to go to Bath for a work meeting.

This is the first time I have stayed overnight in Bath since my fateful visit in 2002 when the online booking site had got a mix up between BA2 (the postcode for just outside the centre of Bath) and BS2 (the postcode for the outskirts of Bristol) and ended up with me trudging through the streets of Bath late on a Friday evening trying to find a hotel.

Thankfully, on this occasion the hotel not only existed, but they also had a note of my reservation.

What they couldn’t change was the fact it was raining, drizzly slightly on the evening, but still damp.

By the following morning it was bucketing it down, and for a few patches where it eased down to a drizzle (which thankfully coincided when I had to leave the hotel to go to the meeting and then again when I left the meeting for the station) it did it for the whole day.

It rained all the time when I was in Bath in 2002.

It rained for the 20 minutes I visited Bath whilst changing buses on my way back to Bristol in 2007.

I am obviously destined to only ever experience rain in Bath.

Though thinking about it, there might have been a couple of lies...

Advanced Meteorology

Not much to blog today, I’m trying to dry myself out after another day of getting soaked.

Some important facts learnt today:

• The top deck of an open top bus does not provide much protection when the heavens open, and in the time it takes to run from the back of the bus to the stairs and down them you can still get soaked.
• The sun deck of a river cruise boat does not provide much protection when the heavens open...

You get the drift.

On the plus side though, I have started to be come very good at spotting when a shower is brewing up, looking at the clouds to see how they are forming and, more importantly, seeing when the local start diving for shop doorways and other cover.

You can tell the tourists who have only just arrived, they are the ones in the shorts and t-shirts who look at you strangely as everyone dives for shelter moments before a cloudburst.

You become an expert by day two.

Meteorology for beginners

Water evaporating from the sea rises into the atmosphere and condenses back into clouds. As these clouds move from being over a cool ocean to warm land the cloud becomes unstable and releases its water content in the form of either Rain, Hail or Snow.

When you have a large body of water (picking something entirely at random, lets say the Atlantic), and it hasn’t met any land for a long time it’s likely to have built up into quite large clouds.

So with this knowledge, why did I come to Galway, about the most westerly city in Europe (ignoring Iceland as its so much closer to North America there isn’t nearly as much ocean) without either a rain coat or an umbrella.

In the space of 5 minutes it went from clear blue sky to torrential downpour (the only saving grace being the conveniently positioned bus shelter and the sense as I walked past it to look up and think, this probably isn’t just a few spots).

And it keeps happening. In the less than five hours I’ve been in Galway I’ve had to dive for cover from half a dozen hefty showers, and delayed leaving the hotel because it was coming down so heavily that I could barely see the other side of the car park.

Still it is my own fault; I did know it would probably be a little damp...

You’ve got to feel sorry for the Swiss.

It’s the Swiss national day, and after four weeks on unbroken sunshine with glorious temperatures and light winds, you would have thought they could enjoy another beautiful day.

But, it hasn’t been, certainly not in Interlaken, and looking at the weather forecast, not anywhere else in the region.

The rain has varied between just about liveable drizzle to the kind of torrential downpours that normally only happen once every few months, not four times in one day.

But, being the hearty Swiss types that they are, they are all out celebrating, and getting damp.

The fireworks start in the centre of Interlaken in about two hours. I’ve already checked. I should be able to get a pretty good view from my room’s balcony, where it is dry, and warm, and not a muddy field.

Still, they all still appear to be happy, if the number of fireworks being set off is anything to go by.

If you didn’t know it was National day, you would swear that civil war had broken out, but then again, this is Switzerland, and they have never had a civil war...

Aspirational, but wrong

Well, I finally arrived in Warsaw, a little bit late. Once again the Polish railways strike, and they had been doing so well. The train was to all intents and purposes on time when it arrived in Gdansk, pulling into the station just 10 minutes after it’s advertised departure time

Sadly, something (I think in Britain it would be referred to as “a-delay-on-a-preceding-train-in-the-Warsaw-area”) held the train up and we eventually pulled into Warsaw Centralny station just over 55 minutes late. I was the lucky one. I was the last to join my compartment at Gdansk, and the first to leave. As the train had started at 6am in the very North West of the country, and was continuing onto Krakow, I didn’t bear to think how late it would be by the time the final passengers got off.

To add to my fun, and in a repeat of Gdansk, albeit this time I didn’t get caught out, as I walked out of the station there was a massive clap of thunder and the heavens opened.

The sacred art of guidebook drying

To say that the weather has been changeable this afternoon would be a bit of an understatement.

After a pleasant wander around the town and a short stop for a late lunch, I caught the ferry up the river to Westerplatte. This small spit of land poking out into the Baltic had a traumatic life during World War II. It was here that at dawn on September 1st 1939 the German ship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire. These shots marked the start of the invasion of Poland and by the end of the day the continent would be mobilising and two days later War would officially be declared.

The area has not been rebuilt and a few bombed out buildings, slowly being reclaimed by nature, and a statue is all that remain. It is well worth a visit, but possibly not during the middle of a massive thunderstorm.

In an attempt to keep sort of dry I sheltered under a tree until a really big flash of lightning nearby reminded me that sheltering under tress in a storm is a silly idea, so I managed to run to a nearby bar and shelter under an awning.

However, the rain was so hard, and kept getting harder, that it managed to penetrate my bag and turned my nearly new guidebook into a soggy mess. As I type this I have the heater in the bathroom up to full blast with the book lying open in front of it in an attempt to make it usable, any attempt to turn pages at present results in the paper starting to disintegrate. That’s how wet it was! Of course, 20 minutes later the sun was out and it was all very pleasant again (if you ignore the massive puddles that had formed in all the streets)