5-29-18 Grand Island, NE

This KOA park is populated with hundreds of mature broad leaf trees with great big canopies.  Now that they are leafy, it is shady and pretty, today.  Yesterday, though, the sky turned angry and black.  While riding in the Jeep, our radio tunes were interrupted with a loud, “B-E-E-E-P!”  It was a weather alert.  The scary voice informed us of severe thunderstorms and possibly quarter-size hail.  Oh, great.  The wind and rain came in bursts starting in the afternoon.  There were little whitecaps sweeping along the length of the roofs of some of the rvs.  Surf’s up!  After dinner and a bit of tidying up, at bedtime, we decided to get small.  We retracted the slides and hunkered down and hid under the trees.

Grand Island RV Park in Nebraska

This morning, it is still and there are patches of blue sky.  No hail last night and so, happily, the vehicles do not resemble golf balls!  After a restless night, I marched out to talk to the birds.  “Sure!  Now that it’s light and the sun’s out, not a peep out of you!  At four in the morning, ‘Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp!’  Hours of incessant chirping!  Do you feathered songsters ever go to sleep?  When it’s dark out, it’s sleepy time!  SHUT!  UP!”  OK, so I guess I told THEM.  Just had to get that off my chest.

The hard-working farmers must feel blessed with the Spring rain.  We have only been here in this part of America’s bread basket for about 48 hours and along the way, many a tractor has been plowing, manicuring and seeding hundreds of acres for hundreds of miles!  I’m no expert but it seems that, this season, the Weather Gods will hear the farmers’ eternal prayer, “Knee-high by the Fourth of July,” and it will be granted.  Just since we arrived, the happy little seedlings appear to have grown 6 inches in the perfect rows, like green corduroy draped over the gentle hills.  The dark brown fields are turning green before our eyes.  What a happy thing.

We’ll depart here shortly, probably 11 o’clock, right on cue.  Next stop:  Gunsmoke RV Park in Dodge City, KS.  Uh oh, all the cows are lying down.  It’s going to rain on us.