Friday September 1st 2023

It started to rain a little before dawn this morning setting the stage for the weather to come. I got lucky and it stayed dry while I was finishing the packing for my travel day. The rain was moving in as I got on the road about 11AM central time.

My first stop was at the Loves travel center about twenty five miles east on Interstate 10. It was moderately busy. There was a least one vehicle in each lane. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean they were filling their tanks. The first car I lined up behind was empty. The occupants were inside the store or restaurant. Having learned from past experience I allowed space for an escape path so I circled the station a couple more times. I finally found an empty lane on the other end of the fuel islands. After filling my tank with over sixty gallons of gas I pulled out past the same empty vehicle blocking the lane I tried initially.

The weather pestered me all the way across the panhandle of the state. Shortly after leaving the gas station a massive black cloud appeared in front of me. As I got closer it began to rain lightly. Eventually it got very dark, but thankfully the wind and rain didn’t get severe. I never had to turn the windshield wipers beyond intermittent. Twenty miles or so later I drove out of the storm clouds back into mostly dry conditions. The storms chased me all the way to my destination.

Around 3PM EDT I arrived back at the Army COE East Bank Campground on Lake Seminole that I ran away from on Tuesday. My site was waiting for me. The park was starting to fill up for the Labor Day weekend. Not only were there lots of RVs, there were quite a few boats as well.

I got setup quickly, because the rain was coming. It was long after I completed the outside setup that the rain arrived. This was a full blown thunderstorm. It rained very hard along with flashes of lightening and the boom of thunder. The forecast calls for similar storms trough the night and all day tomorrow. Somewhere between the storms I need to clean the love bugs off the front of my RV home. The fall hatch of the bugs seems to be in progress.