It's been a little while...

But we're still here. We LOVE our life here at Joe's Place... we really, really do... but sometimes it's nice to have a little break. Having three residents graduate at the same time for the 2nd time in two years was AMAZING... but also a little exhausting. Because of that, we decided we were going to stay here in St. Louis and relax for the summer instead of taking our normal big trip out West. The only problem is that there is no such thing as relaxing when we're here. The constant stream of people in and out of the house, combined with the extreme heat this summer and the fact that a lot of Dan's family had not met Claire yet... caused us to load up the back of our car (we decided to leave our trailer in storage because of gas mileage and speed) and take off the morning after Dan got back from a conference in Orlando. We knew we were going to end up in Seattle... but other than that we didn't know where our stops would be on the trip. We hoped to drive through Nebraska... but flooding there caused us to take the Kansas route. Oh Kansas... if I never see you again I'll be a happy gal. Here are some pictures from Western Kansas:

You would think we have lived in Missouri long enough to recognize signs of a tornado... but I guess not. We drove from beautiful clear skies into the most terrifying hour of my life. Right after Dan snapped these pictures we were blown practically off the highway. I've always experienced these storms from the safety of our basement. I've recognized the power of weather since we moved out here... but I don't think I've ever really understood how powerful until now. We were in the middle of nowhere... no buildings anywhere. It was raining so hard that we could hardly see the cars in front of us. We put on our hazard lights and drove about 10mph until we finally reached a rest stop. Thankfully we never ended up having to get out of the car and the kids were oblivious to the entire thing. We finally pulled out of the rest stop when the rain slowed a bit and drove out of the storm into this...

And this was what we saw when we looked back...

We are so thankful for the Lord's protection. It really was such an amazing reminder of how quickly life can change.

We ended up driving through some more weather in Colorado that night and made it to just outside Wyoming to rest for the night. Next post... our hour spent in the middle of a Wyoming highway...