Black Hills Vacation....Comming Home

On the way home we stopped west of Murdo at the 1880 Cowboy Ghost Town. I just love those places. This one is very well done, besides the same old creepy music they have streaming. I guess its for ambiance, but its more cheese than anything.

We bought the boys cap guns before we left Rapid City and they had gun fights in the street. Although, I didn't know kick boxing was allowed back then.

This is the bank from Gregory, SD. Lewis Grandma lives just one town over in Burke. We've been to Gregory lots of times, it was neat to see pictures of how the town used to look.

Of course this train depot was a big hit with Will. He just loves anything to do with trains. After the Cowboy town we ate lunch in an old dinning car, he really got a kick out of that.

Jack and Ella had fallen asleep and apparently the long drive was getting boring for Will. He decided to make a tent. Ella was running a fever the whole way home. I felt so bad that I couldn't just hold and snuggle her, but its just not worth the risk.

As we were passing Kadoka we started hearing weather bulletins that there was a storm building as we left. Lewis has his handy Blackberry pulled up the radar about every 5 minutes. We watched the skies darken from the west, south, and north. It looked like everything would stay clear of us for the time being so we decided to stop in Mitchell for a quick stretch and potty break.

When we left and got in the car, the weather had changed significantly. There were tornado warnings north and south of us, but they were all heading east, so we gave it a shot.
Here is a Photo of the leading edge of the storm, just east of Mitchell.
The clouds were very dark and ominous.

The plan was to break through the storm since it didn't look that wide, it took us longer than we expected. The rain slowed us down to the pace of the storm at about 30 mph. We had on our flashers and it was a little worrisome. If a tornado came now, we would have NO idea.

Just look how dark the sky was, and that is 5:00 on June 26th. Its the longest week of the year!

We were able to make it out of the storm only to come home and go through it all over again. But when it blew through Sioux Falls, it was much stronger and we had 2 hours of constant thunder and lightning. Our power was off for about 5 minutes, in which time Will and Jack shot the storm with their cap guns.