Well, it’s the time of year that some folks start planning road trips with their family. It will be interesting to see how the relaxation of some of the Covid restrictions and the increased cost of fuel (and just about everything else that we buy) will affect folks travel plans in 2022. Our “kids” are all grown and have their own careers and families, but I have fond memories of most of our road trips that we took.
We would often leave our great state of Texas and head to northern states -sometimes to visit family but mostly just to see other parts of this beautiful country that we live in. Unfortunately, some of those trips involved going through Oklahoma. Kansas and Nebraska during the months of June and July. On one particular trip, we were returning from Minnesota and turbulent weather started showing up in Kansas. We were on a two-lane road without a shoulder and a relentless rain storm hit the area where we traveling through. The ditch on each side of the road was filled with water and it was beginning to creep ever so slightly onto the roadway. This was in the pre-smartphone age so there was no way to follow the storm on a radar – we used the car radio for weather updates. When the announcer interrupted programming to state that there was a tornado on the ground and to take cover, we had no idea that this beast was within a couple of miles where we were! We came upon a small “wide spot” in the road that had a convenience store and I stopped there to allow the family to stretch their legs and to ride out the storm. It was there that we found out that the tornado had been that close – the tall corn fields and sunflower fields and the torrential rain had kept us from visually seeing the tornado. Praise be to God, we survived.
At that point, we still had about 150 miles to get to our destination and it rained the entire time. When we got to the town of Garden City where our hotel was, my fingers had to be pried off the steering wheel of our Suburban -and I am not exaggerating! Whew, what a day. The next morning as we were leaving, I noticed a long train near our hotel that had been blown off the track by the storm. I’ll bet that many of you have your own stories of perilous trips. If not, here’s hoping that you can avoid any problems wherever you are going. Please see these road trip safety tips found below. Safe travel to you!