We were on our way back home from Colorado. My sister and I had been on tour there with our church choir, and my mom had chaperoned the trip, so it seemed like a good idea for my dad and my brother to drive up and listen to us perform, and then spend a week hanging out in the mountains after the tour was over. So we were driving home.
The halfway point between home in Friendswood and Colorado is either in New Mexico (usually Raton) or the Texas Panhandle. Dad and Daniel had camped out in our brand new tent on their way up to join us, so we were going to save money and camp on our way back home again. We decided to stop and camp in Palo Duro Canyon – during the summer they put on an outdoor dinner and musical every night. I’m always a fan of musicals, so I was ok with that part of this plan, but I was not really ok with the idea of sleeping in a tent. I’m a bed girl, thank-you very much, and sleeping on the ground – even on an air mattress with sheets and everything – was definitely not my idea of a good time. I had lobbied strenuously for a hotel, but had been ignored.
My dad, naturally, picked a camping spot in the absolute farthest campground from the park entrance possible. On our way back to set up the tent before going to the dinner and a musical, we drove over several “Water Crossing” dips in the road, all of them dry as a bone. It was the middle of a massive drought – hadn’t rained in weeks, or something like that.
The dinner was pretty good (there’s not an awful lot you can do to mess up steak and potatoes, seriously) and the musical was alright. I mean, they were pretty good singers, and the plot (while cheesy beyond belief) actually existed, so it wasn’t horrible, even if they kept breaking character. . . So the point was not to critique the performance, which was, like I said, not horrible. The main plot of the musical revolved around people living in Texas during a massive drought sometime in history, and they have a “thunderstorm” at the very end. As soon as they played the thunder sound, real lightning and thunder started flashing in the background.
I guess we thought it was heat lightning or something. Anyway, we headed back to the tent and got ready for bed – by the time we were going to sleep it was probably sometime around 11:30. I didn’t really sleep so well – like I said, I’m a bed girl, and I was not happy with the sleeping arrangements. Not that it mattered that I wasn’t sleeping well, because shortly I was not sleeping at all.
At around 3 in the morning, it started storming. The thunder and lightning were right overhead, and the wind almost blew the tent over on top of us several times. The rain was pounding on the roof of the tent (when the roof of the tent wasn’t trying to collapse on top of us) and it was impossible to sleep through.
After about an hour of this, my dad got up and told us to pack up, because we were leaving. Of course, as we finish packing, shoving everything haphazardly into the back of the car (seriously not cool, because I sit in the backseat and since we weren’t being terribly careful about it there was almost no room for me) and packing up the (muddy) tent, the rain had stopped, and the storm had moved on. Of course, we were packed already, so we might as well head out, right?
Wrong. Remember all those “Water Crossing” signs we passed on the way in? Turns out that they were flash flood ditch warnings. And, of course, they were full of running water – lots of it. Enough that even though we were in a Suburban, and pretty high off the ground, we didn’t want to chance going through it and getting the engine flooded. So we drove around for a bit looking for a back exit from the campground – but no luck, it was flooded as well. So instead we ended up parking back at our camping spot and curling up in the car for as much sleep as we could get before the water subsided enough to be driven through.
I didn’t sleep at all during this time period, although I tried. But having to fold yourself basically in half in order to fit into the space available does not lend itself very well to sleeping, or at least it doesn’t if you’re me. So I spend what was possible the most uncomfortable hour and a half of my life folded in half in the back seat of our Suburban before my dad decided that the water was low enough to drive through. We ended up leaving at around 5, and drove for a couple of hours before we found a place to grab some breakfast for ourselves. It was a very long (and tiring) drive home.
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