The alarm goes off at 7am and I can still hear the rain outside!  The dark clouds are still over us!  Okay, here we go again.  I add the liner to my pants, in some vain attempt at not sitting in a swimming pool on my seat today.  We saddle up and head east.

Today is not much of a sightseeing day, more of a “get from point A to point B” day.  We’ve got 650 miles ahead of us to reach Terron’s Mom’s house.

I am still sightseeing all the way though, catching glimpses of beautiful homesteads and farms, through absolute downpours through South Dakota.   I’m finding the various signs advertising museums rather intriguing.  There’s a Museum of Tractors and Museum of Religious Artifacts in South Dakota and later in Iowa I see a sign advertising the Museum of Danish America.  After about 2 hours of rain, we hit sunny skies!  And it’s hot!  It’s now 93 degrees and I can’t wait for that first gas stop so that I can take the liners back out of my pants!  BTW, that attempt to stay dry using the liner, was in vain.  I was still soaked!

We fill up the tanks and park over on the side of the station to strip off a few layers of clothing.  A man walking by excitedly asks, “Are you storm chasers?”  I look at him and say, “No, I think the storm is chasing us!”  He said, “Oh I saw the GoPro camera on the (Terron’s) motorcycle and figured you were out here chasing storms.”  Does he really think it would be a good idea to be chasing tornadoes, thunderstorms and lightning on motorcycles?  I think not.

Still chuckling over this exchange, Terron and I head south on I-29 and sure enough, about 45 minutes down the road, we’re back under a huge storm cell.  I’m watching the dark clouds ahead and around us and it seriously looks like a tornado could form at any second.  The winds are practically blowing me sideways across my lane.  I lean in and hold on tight to stay upright.  The rain is coming down hard!  It’s now rolling off my helmet, down the neck of my coat all the way down to my pants!  I’m soaked- again!  At this point, I find this situation that I’m in so hysterical, I start laughing uncontrollably.  My laughter is loud and just fills my helmet.

Just then I see a white truck passing me on my left and across the back of it, I read StormView Live.  Okay, the storm chasers are chasing this one, while we’re just trying to ride through it!

After an hour of rain, we’re back to the 93 degree mark, so I’m drying out nicely!  But man it’s hot!  At the next gas stop, Terron tells me that he barely saved the GoPro camera from bouncing down the highway.  He could see that it was jiggling on the mount on his windshield.  So, just as he was reaching around to see if it was falling out of the mount, the mount broke in two and the camera just lurched into his hand.  Whew!  Saved it!

Finally, after hours and hours in this heat, we finally hit Terron’s mom’s house in the Quad Cities and our favorite dinner:   Happy Joe’s Taco Supreme Pizza (my half vegetarian, of course!)   After dinner, we head over to a friend’s house to get some visiting in.  It’s our only chance to see Cathy, since she’s headed out of town in the morning.  So we stand in her kitchen with her boyfriend Mark until almost midnight laughing and sharing stories.  Yes, they stood with us in the kitchen, realizing that we’d been sitting on the bikes all day!