Grandpa Time

~Thursday, August 12, 2021~

Day 424

Woke up to stormy skies with 90% humidity and high 80 temps. Hopefully with it being August, we’re at the tailend of having this steamy weather. 😩The worst was definitely Tennessee, where we happened to be in a dense jungle of a campsite. While Jeff wanted to tend to projects on the trailer, Hannah and I had errands to run. Yes, we forged ahead even with the nasty weather predictions. It appears the only good weather day we’ll be having is Saturday where we’re inviting Devin’s family over for a bbq/cornhole day.

We had about 5 stores to hit today in Champaign (Mahomet is a much nicer town but limited on shopping options). We hit our worst weather when we arrived at Target and could even see the rain coming. The skies were dark and talking loudly with all the lightning and thunder. In fact, this set a record for the heaviest rain I’ve witnessed. Many of the storms Jeff and I have seen so far on the trip last maybe 15-20 minutes. But this was a deluge. Hannah and I tried waiting it out until we realized this thing was not ending anytime soon. So I dropped Hannah and the baby off right at the door while I parked the car. After a few minutes of sitting, I finally just went for it. The parking lot had about an inch of water and appeared the drains could not keep up. When I entered the store, there were probably 20 people at the door with their newly purchased goods, waiting out the downpour, being entertained by all the crazies coming in. Then Hannah got a text from Devin. Apparently, his sister was at work in Gibson, where the area she was in was under flash flood evacuation orders. She was basically stranded and knew Devin had a higher clearance truck so with no one else to help, he had to exit work to go get her. The images of the flooding that Devin showed us were unbelievable. Cars and buildings surrounded by standing water where it had evidently rained 8 inches in 2 hours. Since Gibson is a low-lying area with the Sangamon River running through it, it was just a matter of time with that amount of heavy rain that flooding was imminent. By the time we got done with our Target shopping, the scenario outside was quite different, allowing us a dry exit. Wow, crazy!! Praying for the people of Gibson. 🙏

Back at the trailer, one of Jeff’s first projects was repairing the bathroom fan motor (now that we’ve picked up many of the parts at Hannah’s to be able to do the projects). The mounting screws were located in a different place so Jeff had to drill a few new pilot holes to get things lined up properly. He also installed a new switch to be able to run the stabilizers electrically, once again. Manually raising and lowering the stabilizers is not a big deal. The switch is ever so convenient thought!

At the end of a crazy day, we ultimately had a nice evening at Hannah and Devin’s place….Taco Thursday. Fun watching Carson play

with his new building block set from Grandma and Grandpa; now to just keep Ella from chewing on them.😠