Road Trip - Illinois to Utah

Oh boy, here we go again.  We're back on the road and we have a very long way to go.  From Nauvoo, Illinois to James' brother's house in Utah is roughly 1,270 miles.  It should take about 21 hours.  

Nauvoo is actually quite close to Iowa.  The Mississippi River being the border and we know how close Nauvoo is to the river.

 So just a few minutes into our drive we crossed the Mississippi River for the last time...

as we entered Iowa. 
 

Seems like only a few minutes later the sky started to darken.  A storm was coming.  

By the time we got to Nebraska it was around 10pm. 

So here's James' plan for the trip to Utah... drive all night long again.  And this was my plan for the trip... get a hotel again.

James' reasoning was that if we drove all night, we'd arrive at his brother's house in the late afternoon/early evening.  Then a couple of hours later we'd be able to get a good night's sleep.  

My reasoning was that I was tired and wanted a bed to sleep in right then.

We decided to keep driving for awhile longer and were rewarded with a lightening display.   

Lots and lots of lightening actually.  More lightening than I've ever seen in my entire life.  And it was dumping rain.  

I took about a gazillion pictures of the lightening, and only these 3 turned out. 

Then the lightening turned into this strobe effect.  Really bright flashes of light, behind the clouds.  So there were no bolts of lightening, instead the whole sky would light up for half a second.  

It was like someone was playing with the light switch.  And it lasted for what seemed like hours.  It was the most obnoxious thing I've ever seen.  It gave me a headache.  

It was a pretty severe storm, even for Nebraska.  It made the news the next day, for it's baseball-sized hail, heavy rains, and 100 mile an hour wind gusts.  

For the most part, we skirted the storm and missed the worst of it.  We were keeping very close tabs on it, on our weather apps and luckily didn't see any hail at all.  

The storm finally moved past us.  It was headed southeast and we were headed northwest.   So we only crossed paths for a few hours. 

We pulled over to nap for a little while, sometime in the middle of the night.  Then we just kept trucking right along.  James had to drive practically the whole way.  I tried to help drive, but I was just too sleepy.  So I think I only spelled him off for about an hour. 

Nebraska landscape around sunrise.  It's was already looking like a clear, warm day, but we had survived the night and the storm.

We hit Cheyenne, Wyoming around 7am.  We stopped there to stretch our legs and get some breakfast.  We'd been driving for about 15 hours.  

We'd driven clear through Iowa and Nebraska.  We still needed to get through Wyoming before the day was done.  We had about 8 hours of driving to go.  475 miles.  

But we made it!  We finally got to James' brother's house around 4pm.  We'd left Nauvoo the previous day around 4pm.  That had been another 24 hours of driving.  

It was wonderful to get out of the car and know I didn't need to get back into it again for about 4 days!  

The kids, who had actually slept in the car, were so excited to see their cousins again. 

And this time we were going to be able to stay for several days!  

But first things, first... sleep!