Crazy Weather Trip

Saturday the weather was great and the bike ride I help put on was a huge success. Sunday morning we woke up to a day of thunderstorms and a lot of rain. It rained hard over night and when we realized it had stopped around 7:00 am, I decided to get up. To my surprise, I could not open the door into the side tent. The water had caused the tent to collapse and the ceiling of the tent was below the level of the door to the camper. I realized she might not be able to get into the tent from the outside if she went around, so I got the open just enough to get into the tent and pushed up on it to get the water off it.

When I got I outside, I found both of the canopies we had up were sagging with water and on the verge of collapsing. We have the REI Alcove and a Kelty that is a twin to the Alcove. I had the guy wires all staked and had bungee cords to shore them up even more, but we had a problem. So a lot of Sunday morning was readjusting guy wires and the rainfly on the side tent. And in the rain, but not too heavy of rain. Finally, got a break in the room late in the afternoon. We and the ranger thought we were through the worst of it. However, there was a grand finale to the storms. In our fire ring was a really nice camp fire going when all of a sudden at about 9:00 or so, there was lightening and it was close. We scurried to the restroom before we had to go inside. I threw the chairs under one of canopies and the 2 dogs into the 560 Ultra. Our campsite was on the lake in the park and there was just enough light to see the wall of water coming at us. I was the last into the tent and got a little wet. A few seconds later and I would have been soaked. We got battered for about 30 minutes, but everything held this time, no collapsing tents.

As it is apparently a rule for us, if we are in a nearly empty campground, the site that has the loud obnoxious drunk will be next to us. When the last storm hit, the 2 women who yelling and hollering apparently did not understand what the lightening was indicator for and they got drenched. Don't worry, they are okay.

Monday was extremely windy with gusts of 40 mph. I kept reminding myself that it was much better than a day of chasing 8th graders. Today was perfect. We had the sight until the next day, but we are going out of town with our daughter at the end of the week and need to be home for a couple of days. It did allow us to to stay until late in the afternoon since the drove home was only a little over an hour.