Eighty-two degrees at 1:45 p.m.; Twenty-nine by midnight.  Brrrrr.  We’ve been in some doozie storms, this one was no exception.  We knew it was coming, had planned our week around it.  Tuesday night would bring a storm, we were going to take Wednesday off and let the place dry out.  So we (that would be Josh) got the course all set on Monday and Tuesday, of course, it turns out he had to re-set it on Thursday because every thing had blown down.

The storm brought lightening, rain, sleet and ice.  Lots of ice, we were iced in to the trailer on Wednesday morning.  The mud at Coppermines is something we are very familiar with, last year’s race saw a storm that coated everything and everyone in the red clay.  This year we are happy the storm is early so there is time to get out of it.

Over the course of the past two years we’ve seen some awesome storms.  Last year in Sayre, Oklahoma, we huddled with our friends in the trailer waiting for the local fire chief to start the siren.  All of us were pretty sure the tornados we were watching were headed our way.  We pre-loaded the Jeep and Big told me I had thirty seconds to grab the cat, or we were leaving her behind.  The tornados turned and touched ground less than 100 miles away – over 140 of them.

The year before, we were in Hannibal, Missouri, a storm cropped up the Sunday night after the event.  We had loaded up and opted to go in to town to our favorite little night spot before calling it a day.  A number of drinks later, my boys were a bit intoxicated, I drove home and got in bed just in time for the storm to start.  As I laid there watching the radar on my phone, I started to worry.  It was a scary storm, we were down in a rock quarry surrounded by rock walls watching the lightening strikes everywhere.  I woke Big up and told him I was worried, he smiled, looked out the window and told me it would all be fine, before falling right back to sleep.  I was really worried that a tornado would touch down and tear the trailer apart, then where would they find our bodies.  As I laid there I had one thought that I just couldn’t shake, “I wonder if I should put panties on?”