3. Memorable weather

So I'm going to tell you about a dramatic weather experience that I had on holiday in Nîmes, in France. Well, I wasn't actually staying in Nîmes, but this happened in Nîmes, and I'll show you the photo. So, here you go, here's the photo. You can actually see me there in my twenties, looking at the flooding. I'd got out of the car to have a look, actually, at what was happening in the streets. So, this day, it was the last day of our holiday. Actually, the plan was to go for dinner to celebrate my birthday. But, unfortunately, as we travelled back from our day trip, we passed through Nîmes and ran into trouble because ... I don't know if you know Nîmes, but it's an ancient Roman city, or there's Roman remains there. And it has these walls around the city. So I don't know what happened particularly that afternoon, but after all the rain that we'd had in the previous two weeks, it just started filling up. It was like a giant bathtub. So driving through in the car, we suddenly realised that wherever we turned we just kind of had, like, water coming towards us. And we started to get really worried because it wasn't our car. It was a hire car. And sometimes when you hire a car, the insurance doesn't cover you for things like natural disasters. So we really didn't want the water to get in the engine and then have to pay for the damage. That was the big worry. So what we ended up doing – because more and more water was coming our way, it was impossible to find a route out of the city – we ended up parking in the middle of a roundabout. So it was just a small roundabout in the city, but you know how sometimes on a roundabout you get flowers on a flowerbed, and it's kind of a little hill. So we just kind of vroomed on top of there. And we were like, OK, here we're high and dry and safe and we can just wait for the water level to go down again. So I got out of the car, had a look around, as you can see in the photo. Unfortunately, we never made it back to the restaurant to celebrate my birthday that evening. I spent my birthday in a car on top of a flowerbed on top of a roundabout. But it was a memorable experience, so there you go.