Day 1 - Denver, CO - Davenport, IA

Tuesday, August 3rd - Day One on the road. We were up at 6 am, out of house by 8:15, on road by 10 am. Later than we had thought but MapQuest gave us an estimated 11 hours on the road to get to Davenport, Iowa where we had a reservation for a pet friendly room. We made necessary gas stops to fill the van with the car never dipping below half a tank. Bathroom breaks for us, dog walking for Laela. Sometime around dinner time we sat down at a Subway for sandwiches. This was obviously taking much longer than we had thought it would but we felt good to drive so we continued to push through. We passed the Iowa border near dark and shortly after we were inundated with heavy rains. I couldn’t see the road and would have stopped driving but I was following Kent and just clung to his taillights for my life. We finally drove out of the storm, listening to the radio we heard that the area we had just driven through was being pounded with ping-pong ball sized hail and 60 mph winds. Apparently we had pushed through the leading edge of the storm and were the better for it. I would later find out from Kathy that it was at just about that time that she had a call from K-Love asking her for prayer requests and she had asked for prayer for us. How cool is that!? Now driving in the dark but stormless night, we saw dozens of red lights flashing in the sky. Stephanie and I determined that we were seeing a windfarm at night. More on that later… We rolled into Davenport at 1:40 am. Exhausted but glad to have made our first goal.

Stephanie and I mostly saw one of two views on the drive...

Corn

and the back of the Penske truck.

And Laela was Kent's traveling companion. She did so well!