3rd Leg

The third leg of our trip turned out to be our longest. We were supposed to stop in Kansas, but we decided to power all the way through into Oklahoma City making it about a 700 mile day. Like I said...loooong day...so that meant NAPTIME for Carter!

We did stop in Kansas and stretch our legs at the F14 that is parked near the side of the highway. Joshua loves this kind of thing and the kids soaked up all the stuff Daddy was teaching them about this awesome plane.

As we got near Oklahoma City, the skies were stormy. True to "the Edges are in town" form, severe weather was forming. We drove into some pretty darn scary super heavy rain and lightning and wind. At one point Joshua called me and asked "does that look like a tornado right there off to the left of the highway?" It sure looked close to one to me (it turned out not to be but it was close conditions) and I just kept white-knuckled on the steering wheel and we drove out of that cell as fast as we could. We got to our friends, Brad and Jamie's, house and parked, exhausted. Emilee was picked up by a friend and went to stay the night with her and we turned in for the night.

The next day we got to spend some time playing with Jamie and Braeden...

And then we had some rest time out in the trailer so Braeden could nap. The boys snuggled in for some movie and ipod time...

And we of course made some time to go visit Bill and Uni, our other amazing friends there in OKC. Carter asked for his cookie and got in a bunch of hugs!

Our second night in OKC there were more severe storm warnings issued. As I got Carter ready for bed and as I was brushing his teeth I hear "whooooop! whooooop! whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" Yup, that is the tornado siren sound. Seriously?! So I grabbed Carter and ran back into the house, through suddenly increasingly heavy rain. Soon it was hailing and storming like crazy. Here's the video Joshua took from Brad and Jamie's front porch.


You can see the hail piling up in the grass and hear it pounding on the roof, windows and cars.

We all were holed up in their house. The hail was pounding against their windows. It sounded like someone was shooting at the windows. And the hail was hammering our cars (later we found out my van had over $6000 in hail damage). We never saw or experienced an actual tornado, but the storm and quarter to golf ball sized hail lasted for over an hour. We just prayed throught the whole thing that it wouldn't bust out our windshields as we HAD to drive first thing in the morning to make the final drive into Texas and meet our furniture delivery on time. Luckily, as the storm subsided, we checked our cars and the windshields had held!!

We headed out in the wee hours the next morning and as we left we were starting to get teased "get out!!" The joke is always that we attract natural disasters and that storm was serious enough that many people had severe damage to vehicles, house windows were broken and roofs had to be replaced from the hail.