Storm - in a Teacup

I left work a little early on Wednesday. After a warm and quite humid day in Melbourne, there were storms forecast. The radar showed they were heading towards Melbourne and would likely hit in the next 30 minutes or so.

I am not sure why, but the sat nav took me off the ring road at Dalton Road then took me down to Mahoneys Road. The Edgars Road ramp is closed so there was no alternative but to go to Sydney Road and rejoin the freeway there. This wouldn't matter, except that I think pretty much everyone's sat nav had suggested the same route. There was an enormous queue of people wanting to turn left onto Sydney Road, not helped by the queue jumpers who drove down the middle lane and then pushed their way into the queue at Sydney Road. It took an hour to get from Dalton Road back onto the ring road.

Then, the sat nav took me on an entertaining detour through Caroline Springs before delivering me to the Western Freeway. I have no idea why. It didn't seem to serve any obvious purpose but it was rather fun. Not a route I would usually consider!

There was very little traffic on the freeway. Nothing particularly interesting happened. Until I got to Bacchus Marsh. The excitement was on the other side of the freeway and I was not sure what was going on. There were lots of cars parked in the emergency stopping lane. There were police cars and SES vehicles, but no ambulances or fire engines that I could see. And whatever it was stretched along for a couple of exit/entrances. The traffic was being diverted off at the third exit (from my point of view - it would have been the first Bacchus Marsh exit if you were heading towards Melbourne).

Then I became aware that the car up ahead of me was driving in a strange and bizarre way. It slowed down and started moving around between the outside lane and the emergency stopping lane. I was so focussed on what it was doing that I didn't notice the cattle running up the freeway along the dividing fence until I was pretty much on top of them. It appears that a cattle trailer's door on the Melbourne side of the freeway had come open and the cattle had either fallen out or escaped and were running around at will. Only a couple of them were on the outbound side so, apart from one SES vehicle parked in the middle of the road about 500m beyond the cattle, our side of the road wasn't getting much attention.

It might have been better had the weirdly driven car ahead of me put its hazard lights on. It is probable that then I would have spent less time wondering what on earth it was doing and looked ahead for a hazard. And a bit of notice that there was an emergency vehicle stopped in the middle of the freeway might have been useful. Fortunately, the cattle just kept running up along the dividing fence and weren't tempted to run into the cars. And we all managed to avoid the SES vehicle.

And amongst all that, although there was a storm it wasn't particularly exciting. A bit of heavy rain. Lots of lightning. A bit of thunder. And I'm not at all sure that I gained any time by coming off the ring road at Dalton Road. The traffic seemed to be in good order when I rejoined it at Sydney Road an hour later.

The cattle were surprising, though :-D

We didn't get a storm overnight but we did have some lovely storm clouds in the evening

Had it been July or August, you might have thought they were snow clouds.