Absolutely exhausted, but over all everything went well. We left around 1 am, surrounded by an awesome lightning storm. We realized we’d forgotten directions, so we pulled back into the driveway, where we could still use our home ‘net and mapquested directions. We felt silly, but at least we caught it. Everything went well until we hit the county line, when traffic literally stopped. After sitting and waiting a trucker got out of his rig a bit behind us and told us that traffic was blocked for two miles because someone had gone over the cable barriers. They suspected from the police presence that there was a fatality.

Mind you, massive storm going on over head, right? So we, and many more people, end up U-turning, exiting a short distance from Sleep Hollow Road. The storm dies off, but the area out there, if you’ve never been, is dark, tree lines roads with sudden spots of housing communities, the kind where you can’t see the houses or apartments at all, you just see those brick or concrete signs, the only light coming from small spotlights on the signs and a rare car. there are moments were you can only see a few feet in front of you because the road is curvy, which on moonless nights makes it look like the road just drops off into darkness. Fun right, knowing that we missed actually seeing a fatality crash in a monster lightning storm by, maybe, half a mile. Yes that’s right, by about the same amount of time it took for us to mapquest our directions.

We don’t know the area because I haven’t driven around there in years, and again, it’s almost impossible to see landmarks. So it takes us an hour to find a gas station, read a map and choose our course. In the end I was wrong about where we were and we soon came upon an unblocked on ramp to the highway. In our rearview we see a wall of flashing lights, which means we just eeked by the crash site. And of course, the storm opened back up, like it was waiting for us.

I’m a little upset I didn’t think to try to get pictures of any of this, especially since, for the first time in my life, I saw live crawler lightning. It was stunning. Imagine driving on a dark highway, surrounded by hills, that’s mostly empty them all of a sudden lightning comes down, then veers back up to the clouds and turns into a forked net that covers almost all of what you can see in front of you.

It looked sort of like this.

So we got entertained by an impressive lightning storm and eventually I tried to nap. Sleeping in a car… is barely sleeping. I got about three hours, though it wasn’t solid and much of it was more like uncontrolled nodding off.

Again, I missed some great photo opportunities when we hit some gorgeous mist outside of Cleveland. I just couldn’t wake up enough to hold a conversation with Jason much less grab the camera.

We got where we were going, and everything went smoother than expected. Jason didn’t end up getting a nap, and of course nothing is ever perfect, but smooth is good enough. So we were on the road again by nine am.

It was slower going. More traffic during the day and we had to stop to potty, and eat, and once to power nap. I did get some pictures on the way back. There’s a definite progression from the fields of Ohio to the rolling hill of Kentucky.

Then you start seeing this:

Little sleep or not it’s always great to see the sites of home.