How fun it was to go to another baby shower today. It was a shower for one of my very good friend’s son and daughter in law’s baby. It seems like my friend was just bringing her son home much less having now a Grandson. Holy Cow! But he is just adorable and what a good baby he was for the shower. I always feel kind of bad for babies at places where there is a lot of women because the babies are going to get passed around and loved to death. But he was such a little trooper and slept pretty much the whole time, it shouldn’t have messed him up too much. It was a really fun shower and it was also nice to meet some of my friends neighbors and friends. I had a really good time and was really glad to be invited to it. Other than last week’s shower for my niece, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a shower. And now two in two weeks! Score!!
Since this shower wasn’t too far from the river, I decided to head to the Mississippi River to see if there were any barges on the water or just kind of what was going on. When I got to Pikes Peak in McGregor, Iowa the weather was absolutely beautiful. The radio was talking about some storms brewing, but I had a dress on with a light sweater and almost didn’t even need the sweater. On the water I saw a couple of barges further down the river when I was driving to Pikes Peak, and then there was also some docked on the side of the channel. 
I really like going to this park because it’s so quiet the only thing that you hear is some birds and every once in awhile the train off in the distance.
Trains in town while you’re driving to the park
Sometimes when people come to our farm they say it’s so quiet, maybe you just get used to it when you have it every day or something. I don’t know, but you could smell the grass and trees when you were up there and I love it!
On the way home the weather was looking kind of funny, but I didn’t run into any bad weather until I was close to home. All of a sudden it started to rain and I thought to myself, this is a lot of rain. Then the drops got bigger and bigger and were getting kind of splotchy. Crap!! I knew that usually meant that it was going to hail. Now I had to make a decision. Should I let the car get hailed on and have it possibly get totaled or try to find some cover for it? We’ve been together with this car for over 234,000 miles and it’s just part of our family. I would feel terrible for it if it was hailed on so I hit the gas and slid around the corner and headed for this one implement business. I knew that they had to have some type of cover there and just as the hail was hitting the car so hard that I thought the windows were going to bust, I was lucky and got most of the car under their awning. Now granted I was about an inch away from their building wall, but most of the car was safe. I was parked right beside this brand new Ford truck that was huge and all I could do was to just sit and watch it bounce off it’s front hood. The hail let up for a little bit and then it started up again. This time it was coming more from the side so I pulled out from the awning and re-parked the car and hugged the Ford truck. I thought of it as putting a Ford to good use. 🙂 I don’t know how long this lasted and I was so worried that my back windows were going to break. But nothing did and then the sun came out. Great! I was back on the road again. Then all of a sudden I could hear the bang bang bang again. Really? Hailing again?
A quick shot of the hail today. Some of the yards were white from it
So now I pulled into a farm yard and stayed as close to the silos that I could. They were on the side of the car that the hail was coming from so they were somewhat protecting the car. Now if I was thinking from the beginning, this farmer also had a shed along the highway that is used for hay storage that’s never full. I could have pulled into there. Finally it was over again for the second time and now to try to get back home. The road had so much hail on it that you could see car track paths on it. And the weather started to be bad around 4:00 and now that it’s around midnight, it’s still lightening and thundering outside. Just crazy. It’s been lightening so much that it almost looked like someone had a strobe light going on outside for awhile. But we could use a little rain and Daryl got the field plowed up today, so we’ll see what tomorrow brings. I’m sure that it’s going to green up all the yards and will draw the frost out of the fields. Yup, Spring is finally here!