We just arrived in CO yesterday night after a pretty harrowing adventure of a drive. Actually it wasn't the craziest drive I've ever done (ask Michelle about the time we braved the closed Blue Mountain Pass to get to BYU in 2004) but there was a part that was ridiculous, through a little state called Iowa...

One of my best friends at Ave, Stefan Knudsen, is from Iowa, and when he found out our trip plans, he volunteered his parents house just in case we needed to stop. He did so about a week and a half before the trip, so there was no way he could have accurately predicted the conditions we encountered. Yet I think his gut instincts were that we had no idea what an Iowa winter could produce, and so he did everything possible to protect us...

Anyhow, the storm actually hit us in Illinois, with a pretty decent amount of snow slowing us down a little bit. But I distinctly remember that the second half of the bridge over the Mississippi River, as its slope began to arc downwards to the distant shore, felt like an icy luge designed for bobsleds. And thus began something amazing. Thereafter, the road was literally covered in ice, perhaps from freezing rain, I'm not sure, accompanied by very strong winds that slowed our travel to around 25 or 30 mph. I feel like half our drive was spent in that state. Thankfully, we had no mishap, just extremely slow going.

We counted over 60 accidents from the storm, defining 'accident' as a car that had clearly spun out of control, ending up either in the median facing backwards, or in some farmers field, all of which were either now abandoned, or in the process of becoming such. A decent portion of which involved overturned vehicles, and three were huge jack-knifed/destroyed semi trucks. One of those semi trucks was almost comical in its position, having ended up in some poor farmers grove of cottonwoods. Of all things, I was worried about the farmers barb-wire fence. All of the accidents we saw were current, meaning the tracks in the snow they had created were fresh, not snowed over. In other words, tons of accidents resulted from this one crazy storm.

Anyhow, pioneers rock. I'm proud to be from American Stock, and I'm grateful to Heavenly Father for all of my blessings, especially the noticeable things like a car heater that works. Here are some pictures, only a couple of the last, more mild ones: