My family loves Myrtle Beach. In fact, we've been there five times in the last six years. This year Nate came with us, so we drove separately and stayed at his house overnight for our "almost halfway stop." Then we left at 5am so we could beat traffic in Baltimore and Washington. Everything was going great. There was no traffic in Baltimore, no traffic in Washington, and not terrible traffic around Richmond. And then it hit us. Traffic traffic everywhere. For the rest of Virginia and all of North Carolina we were sitting in the slowest moving traffic.
Now, the traffic wasn't the worst. You see, once we got to North Carolina it got very windy and dark. And then it rained so hard I couldn't see the cars in front of me. There we were on Interstate 95 driving less than 10 miles an hour. Rain rain rain. And then the radio warnings started. It made that awful beeping noise (which I had never heard before) and kept telling us: WARNING A TORNADO HAS TOUCHED DOWN IN.... GET INSIDE FIND A SAFE PLACE A CAR OR TRAILER IS NOT SAFE and then listed all these counties in North Carolina that were in the path of the tornado. Unfortunately we had no idea what county we were in, so that didn't help.
To make matters worse, we were suddenly completely stopped on 95. We didn't move at all, and if a tornado had come through there was no where to go. Just miles of cars stuck where they were. I have never been more terrified in my life. All we could do was sit, pray, and hope for the traffic to start moving again.
Thankfully the sky started to clear after a bit, although we were still stuck on the road. People started to get out of their cars and walk around. There were some boys playing lacrosse, people walking their babies in strollers, girls reclining in beach chairs... except that there were tornadoes around it was pretty funny.
There's Nate on the side talking to a man from Quebec.
It took us 15 hours (5 more than it should have), but we finally made it. And what a wonderful week it was!
And that's not all. When Nate and I drove back up to his house for Easter we went to Longwood Gardens... the prettiest garden place I've ever seen:
Nate's family :)
The end :)
ps. I didn't take any of these pictures. Which is why they turned out so nicely, haha.
