What a Day!

This morning, Tim and I awoke to the smells of caramelly goodness coming from the Curp kitchen. We had a delicious French toast casserole, a scrumptious egg casserole, fresh fruit, and a variety of juices. Teri also sent us off with the perfect "sack lunch" complete with homemade chocolate chip cookies. Best of all, though, we got to spent precious time together. What a blessing she has been to me!

We headed out of Kansas City and all was well. In fact, the sun was shining, the speed limit was higher than we're used to (75--sweet!), and the traffic was light. We cruised through Omaha, Sioux City, and Sioux Falls. As we headed across South Dakota, aware that the meteorologist had forecast storms with chances of tornadoes, the sky stayed sunny with just a bit of gray in the distance.

However...

...the closer we got to the Badlands, the more ominous it looked. Before we knew it, we were driving through a front complete with swirling clouds and little "fingers" reaching down to touch the earth. The "fingers" we saw turned to a dark sheet of rain. It's difficult to know what exactly we were looking at. As we sit watching the local news in Wall, SD, I'm pretty certain we were looking at the beginning of funnel clouds. The weather reporter said there were five tornadoes in the country today, four of them came out of the cell we drove through!

And then came the hail. It scared me more than the possibility of a tornado. Tim, thank goodness, was as cool as a cucumber. The ice pellets sounded like gun-shots as they exploded on the windshield, hood, and roof of the car. Needless to say, we were praying hard! We made the decision to pull over at the next exit (which seemed hundreds of miles away) and wait out the hail. We were one of many who made that decision. We sat under the double overpass with 14 other vehicles. After about 30 minutes, the hail had stopped and the rain subsided. We went on, disappointed that after 10 hours of driving, we would not get to see our first big attraction. There is a scenic loop through the Badlands that we had intended to take. After some deliberation, Tim decided to take it anyway, even though it was still raining. He saw a patch of blue sky and was hopeful.

God is good. As we pulled into the first scenic viewpoint, the rain stopped and the sky began to clear. We got several good hours of some of the most incredible scenery we have ever seen. The storm caused us to miss the Visitor's Center (which closed at 6:00) where we planned to make a stop for a hat pin and information, so we stopped just a hundred yards farther at a lodge/gift shop/restaurant. It "just-so-happened" to be the place where Tim and his family had eaten 20 years ago. We enjoyed the same Sioux Indian tacos complete with buffalo meat and Indian fry bread. They were delicious. If we had not been delayed by the storm and had stopped at the Visitor's Center as planned, we most probably would have driven right past the restaurant. Again, God's timing is perfect. He also works in mysterious ways--we could not find a single dent or pimple on the car from the hail!

It's now just after midnight, and we are bushed. Stay tuned; who knows what tomorrow will bring (or tommorrow, if you're in the Clinton camp).

Okay, if you've stayed with me up until this point, take a look to your right under photos. I downloaded a few more. (Hayley, the deer are for you! We got even closer to a few others, but it was too dark to get a good picture.)

One last thing--while the post says it's 11:30ish, I think that's mountain time. Really it's 12:30 for our tired brains and bodies. Whew!