The Return to Florida 2015: Day 1

So I know I should have put a blog post about my new apartment first, but I delayed a little too long in that, so I thought it'd be a fun idea to try and blog every day of my Florida trip!

Backstory for those not fully in the know; my friend Audrey got back from serving her mission in Orlando, Florida, at the beginning of February. She told me she and her brother were planning to make a return visit the last week of May, and asked if I wanted to come along. How could I say no? Best part; some of the people in one of the wards Audrey served in worked for Disney World and Universal Studios, and said they could get us tickets for a day in each place for free. A chance to ride Kilimanjaro Safaris again?? I definitely couldn't refuse that :P

Audrey's brother ended up not being able to come with us, so we recruited abother girl in our ward, Haley, to help with gas and driving.

We left Saturday morning at 5:30, with plans to not make any overnight stops on our 31 hour trip.  Audrey went first in our driving rotation, and we decided to switch off every four hours. This worked out really well, and we had a smooth trip until we reached that terrible wasteland of Texas....

Nah, I'm kidding. Texas was fine....during the daytime. We were about halfway through our 12-hour drive of the trip, when it started to rain a little. We stopped in the adorable town of Fredricksburg for some food, then returned to start driving again. But it had started to rain even harder, and we were beginning to pass sections of road that were partially submerged.  This made for some tense driving, as you can imagine, but it was just the beginning of our trouble.

We had been making our way towards Austin (a slight detour made by the GPS; we had planned to drive through San Antonio instead) when we found the highway blocked by two police cars. We couldn't tell exactly what the issue was, but they were redirecting all cars to turn around and go back the way we came.

Obviously this was a problem for us...we had no idea how else to get through, and it had been raining for the past four hours. Eventually we were able to find a different road to get us back closer to San Antonio, and we got back on our way! It only set us back about 45 minutes, so it wasn't too bad.

Eventually it stopped raining around Houston, and I was able to sleep for about an hour and a half before I switched to drive. This is where it turned into Sunday, so I'll have to pause for now, before I regale you with my tale of driving solo through Louisiana and seeing....nothing. :P