OK,so maybe it hasn’t rained for 40 days and 40 nights.

Yet.

But the storms that drenched the area Thursday provided enough water to float a good sized boat and the wet stuff is still falling as I write this today.

With tornado warnings prompting local television stations to prempt afternoon soap operas, the skies opened up and sent sheets of water cascading down onto Southwestern and Soutside Virginia.

The washout quickly overwhelmed the storm drains of Floyd, sent streams surging over their banks and destroyed driveways already damaged from earlier deluges.

At the Village Green in Floyd, newly landscaped areas washed into the parking lot. Pedestrians caught without umbrellas ran for cover.

Weather.Com shows the probability of rain at 75-80 pecent through the afternoon before tapering off about 6 p.m.

For the last several years, we’ve been crying for rain. Now we’re remembering the old Mongolian proverb:

Be careful what you wish for.

For the second time this year, golf-ball sized hail pounded parts of Floyd County, shredding leaves along the Blue Ridge Parkway and even coating roads in parts of Indian Valley and the Southwestern parts of the county.

With more severe thunderstorms forecast for today and Friday, we could get more hail along with high winds and flooding.

Mother Nature is flexing her muscles and boy is she pissed.

Late last week, as I prepared to crawl into my Jeep Wrangler to drive in for a day at the studio, something on my rear license plate caught my eye.

The plates expired at the end of April.

Here it was the last few days of May, nearly a month after April 30 and the stickers on my license plate read "04" and "09."

Oops. The man who so often castigates others for ignoring Virginia’s traffic laws was driving around Southwestern Virginia on expired plates.

I remembered getting the renewal notice a few months ago and I also remembered going online and renewing for three years but had the new registration arrived?

Good question.

So I went back in the house and searched my desk, always a challenge given the condition of the work space. After several minutes of moving papers, coffee cups and the like, I spied an envelope in a cubby hole: The new registration from DMV. Inside were two stickers with "12" on them and I went back outside, in the rain, and applied them to the "year" side of the plates on the Wrangler.

How I managed to drive 28 days with expired plates is either a testament to good luck or lax law enforcement. Or perhaps the local law saw the plates, ran them, and saw the registration had been renewed.

In any case, I broke the law.

No excuse, your honor: Just plain and simple stupidity.

Ever so often, an urban-based journalist ventures out beyond the city limits and "rediscovers’ America. CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt did it for years with his "on the road’ broadcasts.

Now former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw is rediscovering America along U.S. Highway 50, the federal road that runs from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to San Francisco.

I’ve driven coast-to-coast on U.S. Highway 50. It’s a fascinating road that cuts through the heart of this country and reminds us that America is not just Interstates, fast-food franchises and Cracker Barrels.

On Highway 50, you find mom-and-pop restaurants with good food, drive-in movie theaters that still fill up on Saturday nights and small towns where people live good, full lives without Wal-Marts.

You can find out a lot about America by avoiding the Interstates and taking the time for tour the country on highways like U.S. 50, U.S. 1 and what remains of the old Route 66. Here in Virginia you can see much more of the Old Dominion and its people by taking old U.S. 11 from Bristol up through Southwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley or old U.S. 60 East towards the Eastern part of the state.

We don’t have to go far to find America. After more than 40 decades on the road and 23 years in the National Capital Region of Washington, DC, I can say without hesitation that Floyd County is as much of America as anything Tom Brokaw can find along U.S. Highway 50. We have more cultural diversity than most cities and more resolve than most countries.

We don’t have to drive into the Midwest on U.S. 50 to find a drive-in theater. The Starlight is still a popular gathering place in Christiansburg. We can drive to any number of unique restaurants in less than 30 minutes.

it’s nice that Brokaw is on the road to "rediscover" America. It’s just too bad that it had to be turned into a road show. Some of us don’t need to rediscover our country. We live in it and appreciate it every day.