McDonalds at the End of the World

We were "dining out" this evening.  Guess where?  Actually we ate dinner at home, and then went to McD's for chocolate ice cream sundaes.  We started seeing lightning as we finished eating, so made a run for the car as the storm got closer.  The sky was spectacular so I took a moment to make this photograph.  On the way home, the sky opened, and then the big surprise was hearing hailstones banging off the roof and hood of the car.  When we got home, the lawn was covered with hailstones.  So I gathered up five of them, and put them on the stairs, along with a penny for scale.  What is really interesting about hailstones, is that they are built up in layers, like the layers of an onion.  They start with a speck of dust, which water clings to and freezes, and then extreme updrafts within the thunderstorm, approaching 110 MPH,  sweep the frozen speck up into the storm above the freezing level, where more water freezes onto it.  This repeats over and over until the hailstone is too heavy to be swept up anymore, and it falls out of the bottom of the storm.  Here is a closeup of just two of the hailstones.