I started this trip from my apartment in San Diego and idled at Mom and Dad's a bit farther north for a couple of days. The destination for the first part of the trip was Vermont for Nico and Leigh's wedding. On the 4th, I began by driving from Fountain Valley in the L.A. area to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not too much in terms of pictures, but the picture below I took in the border area between California and Arizona was a theme of the trip to the East Coast: weather.
I was pretty lucky last summer in terms of weather. It was really hot, but easy to drive through. So far, I have seen a lot more lightning and thunder and a whole lot more rain. The second day of driving was more placid; I drove from Albuquerque through the Texas panhandle area and parts of Oklahoma and into the southwestern corner of Missouri and the city of Joplin. The conditions from Arizona all the way to the East Coast were pretty much the same: hot and humid. The heat index in Joplin when I got there in the early afternoon was 107 degrees. The next day, thunderstorms were starting to enter the area. I was ahead of schedule for getting to the wedding, so I only drove a little bit that day, going through the St. Louis area and out to Mount Vernon, Illinois, in the southern part of the state.
The fourth day of the drive began with intense thunderstorms in the general area. I drove through several squalls and saw a lot of lightning while driving on Interstate 64 through Illinois and Indiana. By the time I got to Kentucky, I had got in front of the storms and the middle of the day was calm. More lines of severe storms began developing in the early afternoon, but this time, they were to the south of my route. I went across Kentucky and into West Virginia on I-64 before taking I-79 north and then I-68 east through the panhandle area of Maryland. I stopped in the early evening in Chamberburg, Pennsylvania on the way to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
On the 8th, I drove into the Philadelphia area to visit with Stacey and Vicki who was also there to visit prior to the wedding. It's been about a year since I'd seen everyone. I got "a couple" of pictures of Kelsie and Jamie, of which these are some:
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Last Revised: 14 August 2000
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