THUNDER!

Dallas to Decatur 90.1 miles/0 miles

Cr-Crash! Boom!

I woke up around 5 am to the magnificent sight of lighting flashing all around us.  The school where we were staying had a giant wall of windows facing north, providing us with the imposing view of the storm rolling in.  We got a text message from our leaders telling us to go back to sleep until the storm had ended.  By the time we had awoken at 7am the storm had stopped thundering, but the sky was still pretty grey.  We headed over to Sally's for a final breakfast, only to hear the TV report that the storm had done massive damage to the town we were headed for.  Every 5 minutes they would show a picture of a motel with the entire roof ripped off by the winds.  They leaders conferenced and decided that in light of the possibly dangerous road conditions we would be riding in the van to Decautur today.  There was general disappointment that we would now never bike 100% of America, but everyone recognized that the leaders were doing their best to make sure that we got to California safely.  Sally stepped up again, offering to let us borrow 2 of her vehicles and trailers so that we would be able to make it in only two trips instead of three.  We went back to the school to load up, where we discovered that we had forgotten to unpack the coolers...ewww!  3 day old milk, 3 day old cheese, 3 day old meat, and rotting fruit do not make for a pleasant morning! After getting the coolers sorted and cleaned we packed up Contessa (the trailer) as normal, then worked to situtuate 34 bike safely in Sally's trailers.  With the exception of a few people who were coming on the second trip, we loaded up and headed out.  I don't remember much of the journey, because, like everyone else in my van, I used it to catch up on  some much needed sleep.  We did have some fun playing a game with our iPods.  We would randomly distribute them, each person who got one picked one song, then handed it back to the front.  It was a lot of fun and we listened to a very strange mix on the way there.  We stopped for lunch at a taco place, mmhhh delicious!  Finally arriving in Decatur, we were glad to see that things weren't as bad as they seemed on the news.  There were some downed limbs, but it was not the disaster scene that we were led to believe.  The church was super nice and allowed us to take over part of the gym, although they still had nursery school classes going on (they weren't expecting us to make the 90 mile journey so quick! But that's what happens when you have motor power instead of just muscle power!)  We unloaded the trailers as fast as possible, then sent the vehicles back to Dallas to drop off Sally's cars and pick up our stragglers.  In the meantime, most of us went to the movies :)  A local theater had donated 10 tickets, so we split them amoung us and each paid half-price to go see X-men.  It was better than I thought it would be.  After the movie we went back to the host for a wonderful dinner.  I decided to bike a mile or so to Walmart to stock up on supplies, then headed back to the church.  I sat outside and talked to friends and family from home while watching another storm roll in.

Once I was back in the church I snuggled up on my cot(!)  and watched a movie on the church's projection screen before falling asleep.