Road Trip Ugly…

Like most road trips, there was the good, the bad and the ugly. Okay. In this case, more like the GOOD, the good, and the ugly. It really was a fantabulous trip.

The ugly was the weather. We were dodging it at every turn. We started out with a TripTik, which I threw out the window somewhere along Interstate 69 in Indiana. It was defective. It WAS. Really. It had nothing to do with me. Nothing. What can I say? Besides, my sister had given us Bertha for a trial run. Bertha was her Garmin nüvi GPS. Bertha deserves her own post.

Our trip across Ontario to central Michigan was all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows — thank you Lesley Gore — then, not so much. After that, it was the weather spawn of Satan.

Let’s just say we diverted. Constantly. There was ugly flooding around the Chicago area, so we traveled east and ran straight down the middle of Indiana to Illinois, just below St. Louis, Missouri. Our hotel there had been struck by lightning when a tornado had rolled through a few days before. Again, another post.

When we left Illinois heading to Tennessee, Memphis was getting all of Mama Weather’s attention, so we ran straight across the top of Kentucky and straight down Interstate 75 to Knoxville. Things were stable when we headed to Nashville a couple of days later, but on the day we were due to leave, we raced ahead of Storm Central — St. Louis was now experiencing flooding — straight up through Louisville, Kentucky and Indiana on Interstate 65 and didn’t stop until we got to Michigan. Okay. We stopped for Ding Dongs, but I’ve already confessed my road-trip-junk-food-eatin’ ways.

Yeah. I’ve used the word straight a lot. But, that’s what we did. We did not shilly-shally, nor dally. We made a beeline, a straight shot…

We managed to miss everything by the skin of our teeth, breezed through Michigan and Ontario in a Lesley Gore song again a few days later, and pulled our little engine that could to a halt.

Less than a week later, we had the little mama of all storms here. Yeah. Right in our own backyard. The before images were taken about a month ago. When I got home, everything was fat and green. Then one lovely afternoon, the winds blew, gumball-sized hail fell from the sky battering the windows and plants on the north side of the house, the lightning tripped the smoke alarms, and the rain flooded the grass in 15 minutes…. tops.

Greens Before