There always has to be a vacation recap, doesn’t there?
Day 1: July 30
We actually got up an moving early enough to go to Barefoot for fortification before getting on the road by 9 am. Our goal for the day was Rock Springs, WY. We didn’t quite make it, but that was because there wasn’t a hotel room to be booked in Rock Springs due to some county fair. We spent the night in Evanston, which is 100 miles short of Rock Springs.
Day 2: July 31
Because we had stopped short the night before, we were expecting to only make it to Omaha, NE on this day. And we almost didn’t make it that far.
We hit a huge string of thunderstorms just east of North Platte. When you see people with Nebraska plates pulling onto the shoulder of the highway to wait out the storm, it’s probably best if you do too. So, we sat on the side of the highway for about 15-20 minutes as the storm tried to kill us all. There was hail the size of nickels pounding away on the car. Then, the wind started. Scary wind, people, let me tell you. The world turned white… we couldn’t see the front of our car let alone anything else… no other cars, no trees, no road… nothing. The car was bounced back and forth, back and forth by the wind. This would be when I thought we were going to die as our car was sucked up into a massive tornado. (I grew up in the South where we had tornado drills in school… tornados scare the crap out of me… this is why I live in CA where all I have to worry about is earthquakes.)
The wind finally returned to normal (ha!) and we decided to brave it and head on. A few miles down the road we caught back up with the section of storm we had just sat through. So, we pulled off into a Rest Area where we stared at the rain with a few bikers and a family with a minivan. I called my mom in CA to see if we could find out what was going on stormwise. She passed on info that the storm was following the highway. Joy. Eventually, we decided we had no choice but to go and hope the worst of the storm had spent itself. It was still pretty bad, but we found a semi with lots of red tail lights and followed him through. It was all sunny and calm on the other side. Looking in the mirrors, we could see huge columns of dark grey rain falling… the line stretch away to the north.
We lost an hour of driving time to stopping, but running around in the rain woke us up a bit, so we decided to aim for Des Moines, IA. We got to the hotel at about 12:30 am.
Day 3: August 1
Day 3 turned out to be the worst driving day. We were doing pretty good, even got through Chicago before rush hour, when we found trouble in Indiana. We had switched from Route 80 to 90 outside Gary, IN. We were making good time. So, of course, there had to be an accident bad enough to close the highway. There was tons of traffic, hardly moving, until they shuttled us off at an exit and sent us all on our ways with no indication of a detour whatsoever. (Thankfully, the husband had purchased a new atlas before we left.)
Day 3 we only got to Cleveland when we had thought to get to Buffalo.
Day 4: August 2
The idea for Day 4 was to get to Boston. We chugged across NY state. (Toll roads are nice. The speed limit is 70, and we just set the cruise control for 80. The cops we passed never blinked.)
If anyone ever finds themselves in Liverpool, NY, I highly recommend the Gardenview Diner. They gave us just what we were expecting… diner food, and it was good.
We pulled into Boston around 8 pm, then we met up with my friend, Jason, and his fiance, Gena, for some tasty Indian food.