Our Travel Adventure – Story From The Long Windy Road!

Here is a post to put you into a bright and sunny mood as you get ready for Spring/Summer/Winter?

A story from The Thrifty Couple recent road trip……… We also want to get you in the mood for our upcoming travel post: Thrifty Road Trips, Part 3 coming soon 😉 Catch up on the first two as well!

As many of you may know, we went on a “just the two of us” getaway for a few days! We headed about 6 hours south of us here in N. Utah.  We wanted to go someplace warm. And indeed it was! We left N. Utah here and it was actually pretty decent outside! Spring/Summer was certainly on the way! Well, when we arrived at our Southern destination 6 hours later – it was 93 degrees! Yea – it was warm and nice!! Makes for sweet relaxing time! Well, the next day, it got very, very windy. In fact, so windy that there were times we had difficulty walking! It was still relatively warm though!

Finally, on the last day, we woke up to more wind. Well, no big deal as we were heading home now…….. The wind never stopped as we drove further and further north! You can hear the wind and feel it trying to jerk our little Kia off the road (wind is not great for gas mileage, another reason to always plan to spend 10-20% more than budgeted!)! About 2 hours into the drive, although we had been fighting with the wind the whole time, we had a huge gust of wind that lasted for about 10-15 seconds. We both looked at each other and then looked in the rear view mirror and saw a cloud that appeared to be a funnel cloud.  I think we drove past a small tornado!!  It was not in the road, but out in the plain. However, just driving past it was really overwhelmingly windy!

Then about 5 minutes later, we saw nothing but white ahead of us that we were heading into!!! We saw these vehicles coming out of this white space covered in inches of ice and snow – YES SNOW! And it is nearly May!! Well, we really could not believe our eyes! Sure enough, within a matter of minutes we were in a blizzard! It was very scary drive from that point! Mind you, we left N. Utah just a few days before and it was in the 70’s!

Here’s a picture from out the window – simply lovely, eh!

We kept calling home and finding out how the weather was – our family kept telling us, “it is maybe a little windy, but dry and fine!!” We were driving 40 mph on the freeway! We finally stopped at the nearest stop (about 1 hour after getting into the storm) at a Maverik! This was a hopping place for the middle of Utah! Everyone was in shock and those coming from the south were asking those coming from the north what was ahead and vice versa.  No one had good news to report! It was apparently like this all the way to Salt Lake! We live about 30 minutes N. of Salt Lake and it was clear?!?!

Here’s our cute little (paid for) Kia – snow drenched and Thrifty Al attempting the hopeless – clearing it off (wearing Summer clothes mind you!)

Anyway, many people just halted there trip in the middle of Utah and stayed overnight in hotels there.  We wanted to get home and see our babies!!! So we thought, “we are from one of the coldest and windiest places in Idaho, we can handle this Utah storm.”

So we headed out again. It got worse! We were both under stress ……so what does 2 people in love under stress in a bad storm do???? How about time for a little spat?! That’s right, not something we are proud of, but you know us as The Thrifty Couple, but we are also a REAL Couple!

So here’s what happened! We love road trips as it gives us focused time to talk, and to listen to lectures, sermons and books on tapes from our favorite authors and speakers! Well, that was what we had been doing, it was very edifying! But we stopped it as we could not focus on what was being said! Thrifty Al wanted to take his mind off of the storm and listen to something brainless to make it through the storm.  I pulled out my iPod and he said, “no, let’s listen to mine as mine has a better selection and that way I do not have to listen to your American Idol songs!” I am thinking, “out of hundreds of songs, you are concerned about a dozen or so of my favorite American Idol songs?”  But ….. I put mine away and got his out.  Now let me give you a little background… we both have pretty different tastes in music. We both grew up in a different generation of music and it has always been a bit of a sore spot and one thing we do not entirely agree upon (probably the only thing)!  There is just a small window of similarities.  His iPod was filled with about 3-4 times more music than mine, which meant that it was 85% music I didn’t like, the other 15% was music I had on my iPod too!! But he was driving, and so I can bear it! I started his iPod, he asked me to skip the first song, then the second, we listened to the third, then skipped #4, #5 and #6.  Do you see where this is going????

We had it set to shuffle the songs, well after skipping MOST of the songs up to this point, I was getting really irritated.  A Christmas song came on, Thrifty Al asked me to skip it.  I refused!! If his iPod was so much better, then we were going to listen to the random shuffle of songs! I actually enjoyed the Christmas song! Well, for the next 2 songs – they happen to randomly be Christmas songs.  The car was silent except for festive Christmas music playing! After the 3rd song started, looking around in this white area of space, I blurted out, “well isn’t this music just appropriate?” That was it! Thrifty Al said, “well I just thought that my iPod would have the most songs we both liked!” My response, “did you ever consider the fact that most of the songs on mine (except about a dozen) you also have on your iPod amongst all of the other music of yours???  At most, we would have to skip 12 songs on mine and we have almost done that with yours in a few minutes????!!!!!”

After spatting for a few minutes, we realized just how stupid this was – here we are in dangerous driving and arguing over something of no value! We both quickly apologized to each other and prayed instead.  Repentance and forgiveness is sweet! And afterward, we ended up listening to my iPod and only skipping 2 songs all the way home 😉 What was fun about it, was that we had “Blizzard Karaoke” meaning there was a blizzard of wind and snow outside the car and a blizzard of horrible singing inside the car! Neither of us can sing worth a darn, but it made us laugh through that stressful time! The best part….. I nearly lost my voice from the singing……..

Oh, and the roads and storm – well it actually cleared up in Nephi (about 1 hr. south of Salt Lake).  It was raining in Salt Lake, and sure enough – clear in our neck of the woods …….

Do you have an interesting, funny, or thrifty road trip story to tell? Let us know!