November 5, 2008

View of the day-We're travelling through corn country and since Al left the camera in the lock box in the box of the pickup, when the heavy rain made us stop on the highway...well...no pictures, so...a borrowed photo.

We waited for Al's brother Jeff to make the scene as he drove down from his home in Gerald, SK. He made it by 2:30pm and once we had loaded up his pickup we headed east. We were 15 miles east of Jamestown on the I-94 when the rain started coming down and there was the occasional flash of lightning. The rain started getting worse and eventually the wipers wouldn't keep the deluge off the windshield and we had to do like the other travellers and pull over to wait it out...then the hail hit...small but hard for about a minute...then it was over.

We continued on and stopped for supper before tackling Minneapolis/St. Paul. Marilyn had her hand held GPS that had been doing a super job even though the US maps aren't all that detailed...going through the twin cities it had us well prepared for any exit we had to take and we were getting a bit complacent when it told us to stay right and when we did...the cursor was floating which meant the road we were on was to new for the three year old GPS. Guess where we ended up...right smack city center. We had to wing it for a mile or two before getting back on track and Al was pretty thrilled that we drove right by the Metrodome where the NFL Vikings play.

We continued on and had decided that driving all the way to Dubuque, IA was well within our schedule...we would be able to sleep in if we got in to late and we would be a day ahead. We kept hitting rain showers all the way and about 20 miles from Rochester, MN we ran into another one of those storms...heavy lightning, thunder and hard rain...and again we had to slow to a crawl to see the lines on the highway. After getting through that we decided that we would just get rooms in Rochester and go the rest of the way in the daylight...at least we would be able to see some country. And get this...Al & Jeff went to Walmart while Marilyn stayed at the hotel...

Even with the rain it is still 65° at midnight...nice...