Saturday, December 21, 2013
It was a dark and stormy night. The rain came down hard and steady. Of course Steve slept through it. Obi and I woke up periodically and Obi eventually slept under the covers, which he never does.
Steve luckily had packed his rain suit and was able to get us disconnected and on the road before 8 am but it was a dark and stormy day. Steady rain, fairly hard. Apparently the ground was already saturated, as most flat areas have standing water and the ditches, streams and rivers are mostly overflowing or at least close to overflowing. It rained all day. We pulled into our overnight spot near Benton, Arkansas, just as the sky started to clear.
We saw lots of flooding, but I started noticing that some fields completely flooded were surrounded by fields with some standing water, but were not flooded. Checking on line I found out that Arkansas produces a lot of rice and rice is grown in water. So some of the fields are built to be flooded.
Our truck and phones have so many bells and whistles, we don’t know what they all are. Several times today we got warnings on Steve’s cell that we were in a flash flood area. And the truck told us twice when there was a construction traffic jam ahead. We think that was On Star. Obi suffered through another day of driving, acting like a sack of potatoes, although he didn’t have any trouble sharing my chicken at lunch. But he didn’t want to go into the trailer, even though it was raining.
He’s curled up in his bed now, waiting for Steve to return. He went to see if he could borrow a water hose. We thought we had one, but Steve emailed the previous owner to make sure what we were going to use was OK and it wasn’t. Another item for our Walmart list.
If the weather hadn’t been so bad, we probably would have stopped at Walmart today. But the rain and construction slowed us down and we just made it to the RV park before sunset.
We had no problems, but others weren’t so lucky. One bus had caught fire, disabling but apparently not life threatening (no ambulances). One tractor trailer overturned and another went into the medium and 6 or 7 cars off the side of the road at various places. Another bus was pulled over to the side of the road and a police vehicle was approaching it. No ambulances at any of the accidents, luckily.
Natasha texted that her carpets got cleaned and they stayed in their new house last night! She’s excited and tired.
It takes two of us to make this work. I tried to light the stove to boil some water, but forgot a step. Steve remembered. You have to turn on the burner and then turn the Spark knob.
Luckily I packed some freezer meals so dinner tonight was homemade chili. Very nice on a dreary day. Riding in a truck shouldn’t be so tiring, but all I want to do is go to bed. But I still have dishes to do.
Tomorrow night we should be having dinner with Natasha and family. It seems like this has been a long trip, longer than when we drove the UHaul down, but I think that’s because of all the preparation we had to do. Steve just told me we are 285 miles from the RV park we’ll stay at while we’re visiting Natasha. We did 365 miles today, leaving just before 8 am and arriving at 5 pm.
The good news is that they are not predicting rain for tomorrow!
Time to go do the dishes.
Deb
PS. Apparently Blogger has an old spell checker. Walmart, texted and UHaul are misspelled words.
