Day 5 Disco

Uh, uh, uh, uh, stayin' alive, stayin' alive Travolta? wasn't it? Anyway, we were thinking about staying alive today as we crossed Iowa and passed the fast moving face of a storm front that was, thanks to our friends at NOAA weather band, broadcasting that the dark sky was about to turn ugly with 60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. I haven't seen lightning like that in recent memory. Come to think of it I haven't seen lightning like that anywhere in my memory. There were times when there were so many lightning bolts firing off around us that we didn't know where to look for the next threat. I held my breath. Remember the old business about counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder to see how far away the storm was? Pull a Tony Soprano and "Foget aboud it." Simultaneous is a good word that comes to mind. Abby tried to dig a whole in the tile floor of the coach to hide! I counted 8 cracks or more in a straight line across the horizon line over the road in front of us at one time. Only seconds between bolt "bunches", but no time between heat flashes and cloud to cloud lightning. I jokingly wrote about time travel a post or two back and this time I thought I was finding myself right smack dab in the middle of the real thing. The time machine of Back To The Future had nothing in the way of special effects over this little episode. One big bolt cracked off directly in front of us and I thought for a split section I was gonna wind up temporarily blind. Talk about bright light! You want Green energy? Harness this one Franklin!

Fortunately for us we passed through the frontal line quickly enough that we missed the heavy and huge hail they were calling for. NOAA radio updated the watch to a warning as we passed on through, so we were clearly on the edge. I'm thinking that there Doppler Radio must have picked up the coach streaking though that storm and figured it to be a counterclockwise rotation. For sure, it did leave us "spinning!"

Day 5 Travel Tip: parking under the overpass during a storm like this seems like a great idea, THE thing to do, especially when crossing a big open plain like most of Iowa is. Keeps the hail from wonking your windshield. Gets you off the road in a low visibility situation. Makes you feel safe(er) in the storm. But in truth, that is the worst place you could hide. For starters, the shoulder is narrower under the bridge- you are much more likely to get clipped by someone who didn't pull over in the low visibility conditions. But more importantly, the wind velocity under the bridge is magnified beyond that of the wind flowing over it or around it. And should a tornado touch down, it will be happy to suck you out from under there faster than you can sip a shucked oyster from its half shell whether or not you had time to squeeze the lemon on it first!

As our blog gets picked up more and more places, and I read more and more blogs to see what the competition (I use this word in friendly fashion only) is doing - one thing has become clear. My posts and my travel tips are not your normal fare. The name of that place is: I Like It Like That!

And now I'll be signing off for today. Another heavy storm is moving in and we are in a KOA campground, hunkered down under the nice, tall, trees and on the edge of a field. Brace for action. Seacrest, Over and out!