We said farewell to all our new friends and started out at about 8AM.
Kurt and Nancy, Bill, Mike, Wally and Yvonne all packed up and ready to go we started out on what was supposed to be a 450 mile trip to Kurt and Nancy's farm in South Dakota.
Well it ended up being about 550 miles.
We arrived late and tired and had very little internet bandwidth so we did not upload any pictures and I only posted a small bit here. The netbook was tethered to a very poor connection on my smartphone.
Here is a picture of us the morning of the 23rd, getting ready to roll out at about 7AM.
There's Peter with our green machine, Kurt with his nice white Midget and Mike with is red Bugeye.
One very cool thing we saw on this part of the trip, as we were getting closer to Kurt and Nancy's farm there was a train crossing and we were the first car to stop. Off to each side were grass fields and it was dusk.
All above the grasses on each side were hundreds of fireflies, apparently disturbed by the passing of the train they were all lighting up randomly - it was really fun. I tried to take a picture so you may see some very dark pictures in the web album with a train - that was the attempt to image the fireflies. I think the video camera might have been a better choice but it was out of power so I had to use the DSLR. Later I thought I should have increased the ISO to 1600 and I might have been able to capture the little bugs.
Another thing to note was the odometer hit 33333 during this trip, and here's the photo:
We drove through one significant thunderstorm, we saw one awesome lightning strike in front of us where there were 4 separate bolts that all joined at a single spot high up in the sky, probably arcing across several miles from the ground.
Then came the rain - buckets and buckets of rain. I was dressed only in shorts due to the extreme heat leading up to this event and by the time we had passed through the storm and stopped at a rest area with the others I remarked that I felt over dressed for the occasion.
Our car had standing water in the floorboards and everything inside got a real proper rinsing with rain water.
The next couple days would be more than enough to thoroughly dry everything out.
We stopped at the crossings of the Missouri River and the Mississippi River, got our feet wet in each just for fun. So we put our feet in Lake Michigan and these two major American rivers on this trip.
Peter and myself in the Mississippi:
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