Whew, what a drive

The drive out to Montana was actually a scary one. The weather was very bad. I had researched the weather in the week before, but everything seemed to indicate that it would be best to leave on Sunday. There were storms 'scheduled' the day before, and storms the day after, but Sunday was supposed to be okay. At least that's what it said when I checked on Friday. Saturday was too busy for me to get online and check to make sure the weather hadn't changed.

We hit storms in Wisconsin. Bad rain storms. When I reached Madison, the rain was coming down so hard and fast that my windshield wipers couldn't keep up. I had no visibility, and I couldn't see the cars around me. It was dangerous and scary. I pulled over at the first exit I could to wait it out. The water was building up, so I found a hill to wait the storm out on. But the rain wouldn't let up. It was there to stay. I found some RainX in my car so I applied that to my windshield, which helped my visibility greatly. But the flooding situation was becoming worse. The bottom of the hill I was on was turning into a river with a strong current. But if I didn't go through it immediately, the continuing rain would make it worse and I would become trapped upon the hill. It was a situation where if I didn't leave now, I'd be stuck. I gathered my nerve and did the stupid thing. I drove through that flood, and the current grabbed the car for a moment. But fortunately my car eventually grabbed onto some pavement and I was free again. I headed back to the freeway.
I drove onwards because I realized that everything was flooding behind me. Waiting or delaying would mean being stuck in a flood. The rain was not letting up. Besides, I missed my baby daughter and couldn't wait to see her again.
Eventually when I reached Wisconsin Dells, the skies were clear again. We stopped for a breakfast at Paul Bunyan's, my favorite restauraunt. Little did I know that the lake that Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist city, was build on would disappear completely later that day. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/11/lake.delton/index.html). The flooding caused the embankments to flood and the whole lake emptied into a nearby river. It took an hour and a half for the lake to drain empty like a bathtub. Weird.

We continued on, unaware of the impending doom of the lake town we just left. Storms plagued us the rest of the trip. We watched a tornado form in Fargo and worried whether our drive would take us too close to it. An empty gas tank forced me to stop and get gas when I was trying to outrun that storm and caused me much stress and adrenaline. We finally made our overnight stop in a small North Dakota town.

We woke up early the next morning and continued our drive. Fortunately day two of the drive was uneventful. We had clear skies, although it was cold and windy. It actually felt like winter, with temperatures in the 40s. I had not packed a winter jacket. At a rest stop in North Dakota, some travelers remarked on us. "Now those must be locals," a man quipped to his wife. "They don't have jackets. They must be used to the cold weather". I didn't have the heart to say that we were just traveling idiots who didn't think to bring jackets.
We finally arrived safe and sound at our destination in Montana in the afternoon.