Those are the only words I can come up with to describe the incredible weather event we witnessed in Kearney, Nebraska last night!
Yesterday was one of those days, temps around 30C/86F, beautiful blue sky, and strong warm winds. At home that immediately brings to mind the threat of forest fire and I commented more than once to hubby that the weather just didn’t feel good.
Shortly after 8:00 p.m. the lightening started and it never stopped, just one strike after another. It looked like a fireworks show that went on for just over an hour, where every firework set off was a clear color and continued with one or two flashes every second. The sky never went dark! We could hear the rumbles of thunder in the distance but it was the lightening that was just amazing. Along with lightening we had a torrential downpour (I can now see how flash floods happen, the Walmart parking lot was flooded!) and heavy, heavy winds.
This picture doesn’t do the storm justice but I wasn’t going outside to try and get a better one … and I definitely wasn’t standing outside in a thunderstorm trying to get that perfect shot of a lightning strike!
Once the rain and wind died down the lightening slowed down but it still kept coming, one strike after another … and then the thunder finally started sounding like thunder. Big crashing thunder and bright jagged lightening strikes that continued well into the night. I hesitated to even write about the storm in my blog because there is just no way I can convey the intensity or magnitude of it, but I wanted the memory for hubby and I when we looked back. This is a storm that will go into the memory bank with the typhoon that came in the night we tried to fly home from Nagoya, Japan.
It was very dark this morning when we hit the road at 8:30.
Our plan today was to spend the night in Omaha, NE, but a few days ago we decided to add another stop to this jog and we wanted an extra day there. That led us to make the decision to drive a little longer today and spend the night in Des Moines, IA. But as often happens with jello solid plans, the jello wiggled 🙂 As we were entering Lincoln, NE I opened up our map book to mark off where we had travelled and I noticed that it would save a lot of miles and time if we bypassed Des Moines and headed straight to Kansas City. Both Omaha and Des Moines were Walmart stops so we weren’t going to miss anything and now we have saved some time, money on fuel, and turned off the interstate onto secondary roads, you can’t go wrong with that!
I thought Iowa was the corn state but all we saw in Nebraska was field after field of corn.
We crossed the Missouri River just before we crossed into Iowa. I’m not sure why this was so exciting but hubby was pleased he had seen it 🙂
Ok wait, Iowa is the corn state, it is also field after field of corn. Hubby was really surprised that none of the corn had been harvested so I finally gave in and looked it up on the internet … and of course he was right both Nebraska and Iowa are behind on their corn harvesting.
As it turns out Missouri is also a corn state, and we are having corn for dinner 🙂
Until next time …
There are different stops along the way were you can listen to an explanation on your audio box and see the factory floor. We learned that Coors is the worlds largest single site brewery in the US and at full capacity they bottle 3.2 million six packs of beer a day.
Maxx Trails 