If you've been sweating in Buenos Aires like Rush Limbaugh in a wetsuit doin' tabasco shots in a sauna with horseradish chasers... you're not alone. If you're surprised at the heat, you gots lots of company on that front too. The average temperature here in the city is 68F... it never gets to freezing...it never gets to 100F and hot weather like this rarely sticks around this long.
This heat wave is unusual and, in my 6 years here, unprecedented. Being a mid-western boy, I grew up with weather like this... especially the days when the rain is welcome but just makes things worse with the humidity that results.
That's the surprising component: usually, 90F weather in Buenos Aires brings a wave of rain with a cool dry air mass behind it that can not only dry the streets before you know it ...but your hair and shirt as well!
This is weird for Buenos Aires and places beyond Capital. Last night, the storm that rushed through our ranch from Azul on its way to 25 de Mayo and beyond, brought the strangest weather I've ever seen there.
Dust devils appeared in the dirt road with strange downdrafts from the thunderstorm that looked like it might spawn a rare Argentine tornado. As it looked like were being engulfed in a whirl of chaff from fields of crops, I suddenly realized that the swirl was not plant matter but rather giant clouds of grasshoppers that had been vacuumed out of the corn and sunflowers.
A big dust-tail behind a fast-moving pickup truck is a common sight on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere ...but the dust was moving faster than our little strada and the plume of powder from the still dry road was actually out-running us! Visibility was now zero. If you're wondering, it's not just you. This is some very unusual weather here.
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