Wednesday, June 11, 2008 - 6:00 am

It is a beautiful, sunny day and time to get in the car and head west. We made several phone calls along the way and learned about the record flooding that had been happening back in Iowa. The reports called it a "500-year flood." At a rest stop in Illinois, we ran into Bill Cavanaugh, a classmate of ours living in Charles City, who described the last week and said that he and his wife lost all of the contents of their home on the Cedar River and will have to do some extensive repairs. We got home around 10:45 pm after taking a detour through Parkersburg so Gale could show me the devastation from the Memorial Day weekend F5 tornado. The rain started just as we pulled into our garage, but we had enough time to get the car unloaded before the thunderstorm really hit. Mileage from Delaware City to Clear Lake was 1150 miles.