Peace Out, Prairie

A close up of yellow wildflowers 

For the last few days, we haven’t really stuck to our plan. Which was kind of our grand plan: be flexible. We needed to dump our black water tank, and there was a Cabela’s a half hour from the Indiana Dunes National (State?) Park that we could park at overnight and use the dump station. This half hour brought us in the direction we were going, so instead of our original plan which was to back track the next day to spend more time at Indiana Dunes, we decided to go even further on our route, and stop at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois. Even though I’m sure there was more beauty to be seen at the Dunes, we really didn’t feel like back tracking and had also wanted to see the bison that live on the prairie.

Close up of a bison grazing in the prairie

The prairie was HOT. Too hot. The humidity was high, and it was probably in the nineties, and definitely hotter in the trailer. We couldn’t really spend much time outside because it was so buggy and there were a ton of wasps surrounding Opal. We somehow made it through the day without dying of heat exhaustion. The upside was that we were in a beautiful prairie surrounded by wildflowers and we got to see some bison!

We looked at the weather for where we were planning on stopping in Iowa for the night, and it looked like more extreme heat and humidity and thunder showers all night. We decided to screw that idea, and hopped in the car for about eight hours to get to our next stop in Nebraska. We hadn’t left until after 6pm (remember, Corey has to work a full day AND we did a three mile walk to see the bison), so we weren’t projected to get there until after 2am. We decided it would be worth it to get away from the awful weather. Now if you know me, you know I have pretty bad anxiety. For some reason I am REALLY scared of tornados. I think I may have seen the movie Twister too young or was traumatized by The Wizard of Oz. Whatever it was, the fear was REAL, and we were driving through freaking Iowa with booming thunder and lightning illuminating the sky. So I was having a panic attack in the passenger seat while Corey was trying not to hydroplane. I decided it might ease my anxiety to look up some facts about tornadoes. Nope. Did you know that forty percent of tornado related deaths occur in motorhomes? The storm eventually passed, outside and internally, and we managed to drive about seven more hours without killing each other.

Grassy prairie land that seemingly goes on forever with a tiny me walking down the road

We weren’t sure what to expect from the campsite in Nebraska we found on the “Free Roam” app, but SWEET RELIEF it was perfect. We pulled up and there was only one other group camping there. It’s on a beautiful lake surrounded by yellow dotted rolling hills and the high for today is seventy five!