After we drove through Starve Hollow, we continued on to Seymour, hometown of John Mellencamp, and the largest town in the area. Andrew goes to the Lutheran high school in Seymour, and it's the home of the Walmart, so we went to do a little shopping. All loaded into the family van, FIL drove us past Andrew's school then decided to find an alternate way home through areas they hadn't discovered yet. I always love an adventure full of discovery, so I was all for this plan.
Unfortunately, Jackson county had experienced record rainfall and flooding the week before, so this tampered with the plan. We were northeast and needed to be southwest, and we went westward from the school. We could never get more than a block south before encountering a "Road Closed" sign. Hoping to pass the flood zone, FIL continued west.
As the minutes ticked past and the younger brothers got more and more disgruntled, FIL turned around and headed back east, hoping to take the first available street south in an effort to get back into Seymour and main roads. Each one was closed. Finally, getting fed up, he drove around a sign to try our luck at the puddles. The first attempt took us through manageable puddles until we got to one that looked far too deep. So we gave up and went back north.
The adventure was starting to get a little too long for ALL of our tastes.
We came upon another road with a car coming northward past a Road Closed sign. If he made it through, so might we! We drove over a few puddles: no problem. When we came upon one of indeterminate depth, FIL got out to test the depth. We had come too far to give up now! The water went just above his feet, so he drove through. The van made quite the wake, and we all held our breath, hoping we wouldn't stall out in the middle of the puddle. Oh, did I mention we were almost out of gas?
Success! That is, until we came to the big mama of all puddles. FIL got out to test again, and I finally did the smart thing and pulled out my camera:
Hmm. Almost knee-deep and not quite at the halfway point. No thanks!
We eventually ended up exactly where we started and took the highway bridge over the river and the flooding and took the main route back home. So much for the adventure. But we did get to see a lot of Jackson County farmland, complete with flooding and ruined soybean crops! It became an extremely hilarious joke after a while to point out where the water level had been on the corn. Heh heh.
When the parents came up a few weeks ago to drop Michael off at college, FIL informed us that he had eventually learned that even if we had gotten past all the huge puddles, we would have had to have turned around anyway, since there's only one way over the river: the highway bridge we did indeed end up taking.
What should have been a 30 minute drive took closer to three hours. I was hungry for food and the van was in need of gas, so it was hard to laugh about it at the time. But within a few hours and days we could well appreciate the humor.
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