A rough start

Friday evening we started out for eastern South Dakota and just a half hour down the road ran into quite a suprize!
The weather was great to start with and then all of a sudden we heard a sound that you really do not want to hear while in a vehicle surrounded by glass...hail! It started small, about pea sized, but quickly grew to tennis ball size. The over passes were full instantly, we decided to keep going as this was just the beginning (we had turned off Patch the Pirate and tuned into a local radio station) there were times we were going just 15 miles per hour, but it was so sad to drive by all the people on the side of the road that had lost 1 or more of their windows. We just kept praying, "Lord, please keep the windows, please, for the children." He answered our prayer, though we did have a crack in the windshield, it never caused any trouble.

As we looked to the other side of the interstate, they had closed it due to the large amount of glass along the road. For 10 miles we saw a double lane of vehicles bumper to bumper, and almost all of them were without at least one window. Bikers were running from their motorcylces and finding safety in strangers cars and trucks. We so badly wanted to stop to see what the damage was, but decided we HAD to stay in front of the storm so kept going. We drove for about an hour before feeling it was safe to stop for a few minutes. These pictures aren't great, it was raining, but I had to have something for the blog. I have to say I was a HONDA lover before, but we faired so well in comparason to the other vehicles we saw. I saw one family in a Chrysler 300 they had two adults and three kids in the front seat because their back window had been smashed in. The cars looked like they had been beaten with baseball bats. We had minor damage compared to most others...it was hard to watch hail stones the size of tennis balls bounce off of your hood! We have reports that we had up to $10000 damage to our 2007 Honda Odessey. We dropped it off at Vern Eide Honda in Sioux Falls (were we bought our last two vehicles) and they have started on it as of today. We are now driving a loaner 2000 Odessey until our Van is finished. We are thankful the Lord protected us as well as He did!

By the way...if any one wants a good vehicle and want to trust that you will be taken care of contact Curt Foos at Vern Eide in Sioux Falls! They have done well for us with our 1998 Accord and 2007 Odessey!

I am sure you will hear more about this at a later date!