Happy Fourth of July!

We left Firday afternoon for a long holiday weekend up at Camp Freedom. We packed up our gear, coolers, the kids and the dog and left town in the early evening, hoping to get a good night's sleep and and early start on our wall sheathing work the next morning. We drove for about an hour and stopped at a McDonald's for dinner. As we were enjoying our burgers, the sky starting turning very ominous. What had been a lovely, hot summer day quickly turned black as night as a huge storm front raced in. The other patrons in the restaurant all starting looking around at all the plate glass windows and started moving towards the back of the building, away from all the glass. There was a cashier back there and I quietly asked her what their safety procedures were for a tornado warning. She informed me, "employees in the cooler, customers in the bathrooms." Just then, the sirens started to wail and a small girl started to cry. We huddled for safety as what we thought was the worst of the storm passed and then went back to our table to finish our meals and consider our options. We thought that since the storm was moving really fast, if we just waited it out, we could still make it out to camp that night. Luckily, there was a man seated next to us with a laptop and he had pulled up the weather radar. There was clearly a second round of storms to the south that was headed our way. Not wanting to take shelter from the severe weather in a tent, we decided the best course of action was to high tail it home and try again in the morning. We made a dash for the car and started back to the city when we were confronted with what we have since been referring to as the "Death Cloud."

Now the picture certainly show it is ominous, but what the picture doesn't show is the almost constant cloud-to-ground lightning that was shooting out of the leading edge. It was a most apocalyptic sight and we were all more than a little nervous as we made our way into the storm. Once under the cloud, the rain and hail was so intense than all traffic had pulled off of I-35. We were all more than a little relieved once we made it home in one piece and we were certainly grateful that we hadn't tried to ride this one out in a tent. We woke up the next morning to a beautiful, sunny summer day and hopped back in the car for a few days of celebrating our many freedoms.