Oh my God, I’m in Iowa again. I’ll have more to say on that soon enough, but first a word or two about what happened on the way here.

We left Taos on Friday morning, intending to follow this route:

North to Ft. Garland, CO >
Over La Veta Pass to Walsenburg >
Colorado Rt. 10 to Rocky Ford >
North to Limon, CO >
Catch the Interstate at Brush >
Head east to Ogallala, North Platte, or Kearney, NE

A tried and true path, one that we’ve taken many times before. If you know that part of the country and haven’t gone that way, you ought to try it. Very relaxing driving, most of the time, and almost zero traffic. This time, however, the weather had a say in the matter.

It was windy but sunny up through Walsenburg. We took Colorado Rt. 10 from there to Rocky Ford the way we always do, and it started getting cloudy. The wind picked up some more. On the way to Limon, the dust started blowing. Uh-oh. As it happened, the dust and wind were so bad we decided to bail out before Limon and head east on Rt. 96. (The storm was somewhere north and west of us, so we thought to skirt it before heading north again.) By now the blowing dirt was of Dust Bowl proportions: the wind was horrific, gusting to 60 mph, and what we heard sounded like someone throwing gravel against the car! I was sure there wasn’t going to be any paint left. My wife was driving, poor girl, and several times she had to come to a complete stop in the middle of the road because of zero visibility — a dangerous thing to do, but we were virtually alone on the highway.

Somehow we made it to Kansas. As we moved farther east, the wind died somewhat, the dust abated, and glory be, there were patches of sunlight and blue sky. By the time we got to Scott City, NE, it looked like we could make it another 100 miles north without much trouble (i.e., that the storm hadn’t moved that far southeast), so we decided to head for McCook, NE, just a short hop from Interstate 80 and our original route.

Hahaha.

About 15 minutes north of Scott City, all hell broke loose. The wind blew even harder. A proverbial shitpile of fine snow started blowing diagonally across the road, pushing us all over the highway. We found a regional weather station that reported a BLIZZARD WARNING for southwest Nebraska, just one county east of McCook. Seeing as how we were already in one by my standards, that was pretty damn scary.

The wind was howling and my honey struggled with the wheel. Just getting another 50 miles up the road looked awfully iffy, so I decided to bail out in McCook if we could actually get there. The Rand-McNally highway atlas had an 800 number for Holiday Inn reservations, and I remembered that there was one in McCook. Amazingly, my cell phone worked. The “service’ rep in bloody PAKISTAN had to repeat everything three times, but he was exceedingly polite. I nearly poked my left ear out from holding my finger in it (so I could hear through the other ear), but the reservation went through. That I could do this from the car, in a blizzard, was rather remarkable, I thought, but there was no slack for self-congratulation yet.

The last two hours into McCook through fading light were ghastly, as the snow turned much heavier and started sticking to the pavement. It was fast becoming dark. The roadsides and what I could see of the landscape were covered with white. The wind was unbelievable. We were also running out of gas, and you may easily imagine our relief at finally rolling into the Holiday Inn Express parking lot!

I’ve been in worse snow — once in Maryland, it snowed so heavily that the motor in my VW Rabbit quit — but I’ve never encountered anything like the weather we went through that day. If the ground had frozen before the snow started, we might still be there. On MAY 2ND, mind you. And the new car? Our Pontiac Vibe did very well indeed, notwithstanding being batttered by the wind, and still delivered between 32.8 and 38.6 miles per gallon for the day.

Saturday was sunny and breezy. We drove 700 miles and made it to Dubuque by 8:30 p.m…