Compelled By Reality

The Rough Drive to Tally

Filed under: Blogging, Family

I won’t make this a long entry. Only because every time I begin to write something for this blog I get this feeling of “take a deep breath, this is going to take a while.” And I do not like spending hours on one post, which has sometimes happened, and basically that is why there was such a huge gap for a while between posts. I just decided if blogging is going to take me that long for each post, I don’t have time for that in my schedule. Especially as my schedule was a little crazy for a while. It is still intense now, but manageable.

So anyways, getting back to the drive. I finished the set I lead at 8pm and walk out of the prayer room doors and it smells like rain. I still have a few things to take care of so I start driving around getting those things done and it starts pouring rain. At this point I start to think to myself “oh, great… what a great way to start a trip” (thinking that rain was the worst it could get).

I get home, go in the house to get everyone into the car and it starts hailing. We are hungry, haven’t eaten and were going to eat on the road so we get in the car and go get some food. While we are starting to eat, we find out that 5 tornados have touched down in a town just south of Kansas City and the storm is coming this way. We decide to go home and wait it out in our basement, so when we get home the tornado sirens start blaring, and they are loud. It really sounded like we were in a movie, it was really bizarre.

We wait the storm out and an hour or so later, we are on the road. Our dog Chloe came with us on this trip since we were going to be gone for 3 weeks. And normally she doesn’t shed an obscene amount, but of course she doesn’t ride in a vehicle very often and she started shedding. This was ridiculous. Just about every time we opened the car doors when we would stop, hair started flying everywhere. It was disgusting.

It didn’t stop there. We had just bought a spare tire because our spare had a gash in it, and about 3/4 into the trip, our tire blew out. No, I’m not kidding. And the fun just kept coming. We were in the Chick-fil-a parking lot while I was opening up to rear passenger door and Stephanie ran over my foot. I calmly made her aware of this fact with a nice but firm comment about her getting off my foot, yet for a second she didn’t move. She thought I was kidding! So she finally moved, and we made it to Tallahassee after a long and grueling 23 hour drive that should have been 17-18.