When we left this weekend to drive up to the Cape, we were prepared.
It takes three days to get there from Texas, and even though I’ve made the drive over 75 times, I don’t leave anything to chance.
There was a cooler packed full of snacks.
There was a brand new audiobook cued up and ready to go.
There were extra chargers ready in case we lost the chargers along the way.
The car was full of gas.
The seats were heated.
The route was mapped.
The stops were planned.
We thought we were ready. Every detail was planned down to the last second. What in the world could possibly go wrong?
And then?
Sigh.
This happened.
It was nothing at first—just a few drops of rain.
I looked up and stared at the sky out of the car window a couple of hours into our drive.
Then I saw flashes of lightning and thunder, and out of nowhere, the skies opened up and the entire precipitation quota for the western hemisphere rained down on our car and the highway around us.
We couldn’t see more than 50 feet in front of us.
It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and it looked like midnight.
Our phones buzzed with one emergency alert after the other.
Tornado warnings.
Flash floods.
Over and over and over again.
Every 15 minutes, our phones sent dire warnings of impending doom.
This wasn’t in the plans. We had a schedule to stick to. We were supposed to be in Louisiana by now.
Should we stop?
Could we stop?
High water on the road made up our minds for us.
Schedules were going to have to wait.
Even the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.
And so it was that we booked a hotel 15 minutes away and prayed our way through the blinding rain storm to the hotel exit just up the road.
We pulled up to the hotel, unloaded the car, got the keys to our room, poured a cup of coffee in the lobby, took the elevator upstairs, opened up the door and immediately collapsed on the bed.
I almost cried, I was so relieved.
“Were you scared?” I asked my husband. “That was intense. I was so worried the car would skid in the water or we’d get blown off the highway with high winds or a car might have stopped in the middle of the road and we wouldn’t have been able to see it.”
He looked at me with a sheepish grin.
“Yes. I was scared,” he said. “But not really of all that. The thing that frightened me the most was the alligators.”
Wait.
What?
Alligators?
If you could have given me 5,000 guesses of what he might have been scared of? Alligators wouldn’t have even cracked the top 4,999.
“Alligators?” I said, attempting to sound encouraging instead of incredulous. “Why alligators?”
“We were headed through Louisiana,” he said. “What if our car went off the road and we ended up in a swamp and we were trying to get out of the car and an alligator attacked us?”
“And besides,” he said, “Alligators are really fast and I don’t think we could outrun them—especially through a swamp.”
And then he lay his head back down and closed his eyes with an expression of utter relief at our narrow alligator escape.
See what I mean?
Driving to Cape Cod is NO JOKE.
Even with the best-laid plans, sometimes you have to be prepared for every eventuality.
It’s best to keep your eyes open and steer clear of all the dangers on the road ahead.
Flash floods, rainstorms, thunder, lightning, tornadoes, road blocks, high water on the road and of course…
….the occasional fast running alligator.
PS I love my husband more than life itself and I fully support the effort to steer clear of any and all reptiles.
PPS I read this post to my mother and she pointed out that if the swamps flooded and this could be a legitimate concern and that my husband was actually way ahead of your average driver.
And you know my mother is always right.
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