Weeeeeee're Baaaaack!

...Did you miss us?
We left Florida around 12:30pm central time and made it home roughly 24 hours later. Our new (to us) van has a neat feature that lets it keep track of driving hours. It took 19 hours driving to get down to Florida and 22 hours driving to get back yet both trips took 24 hours each. I guess we stopped more on the way down than we did on the way back and took our time more when we did stop.

We did have a couple of interesting moments on the way back when we encountered a sudden and violent storm. I have to admit it was a little scary. Our new van did it's job admirably and carried all of us and our luggage comfortably and got good gas mileage along the way but it's still a van and the wind was rocking us and blowing us all over the place!

I had been watching the lightening in the sky for close to fifty miles. The wind was calm and the sun had already gone down so it was quite the entertaining show for me. Dea and the kids were sleeping. No rain. No wind. Just lightning. It was like this as I said for 50 miles when it all came on at once. It was like hitting a wall of rain while suddenly having a wall of wind hit you from the side. Within a minute the rain was mixing with hail and I knew I had to get off the interstate.

I took the next exit and began to wonder if perhaps I should have stayed on the interstate.

There were leaves and branches blown across the road. No gas stations; no convenience stores; no lights; nothing. Except another turn off that was really dark. I kept going looking for a place to pull over that wouldn't get me stuck, but was abruptly sent across a narrow bridge. I don't remember the sign for the river that flowed underneath just that at the moment I wasn't crazy about being on a bridge when it was all I could do to keep the van on the road.
Right after the bridge was what seemed like a tree canopied road. It was so dark it probably wasn't, but the way the leaves and branches were falling and the look of the road I just stopped. I backed up to a little dirt area that would let me drop the back wheels of my front-wheel-drive van off the pavement long enough to make a three point turn around and then headed back across the bridge. By this time Deanna was awake and looking at the map for an alternate route but there was only one other way to go. I turned down the dark little road and again, just stopped. There was a little dirt and gravel pull off for boaters. I just didn't trust the van not to get stuck and the sign ahead said: "narrow bridge". I thought the last bridge I went over (twice!) was narrow and they said nothing about that one!

I. Am. Not. Going. Over. This. One.

So as the van rocked I parked with two wheels on the road and two off with the back of the van towards the wind to try to keep us from being blown over and we waited. Listening to my emergency flashers blinking noisily we scanned the radio for information about any tornadoes or severe thunderstorms and got....nothing.

Evidently there was a 30% chance of showers.

I noticed lights behind me and checked my rear view mirrors. I could see both the exits and entrances for the interstate and in just a couple of minutes time I had been joined by three cars and three tractor trailer rigs. I actually felt a lot better knowing there was a group of us all sitting by the road waiting for this fast moving storm to just ....go...away.

Which it did. Because we were stopped and not traveling at 55 mph (don't get me started on construction zones arrgh!) the storm took a little longer to leave than it did to arrive but eventually my storm buddies started pulling away and so did we. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

We'll post more about our vacation later.

"Lord willing and The Church doesn't rise" that is!

Will.