Off to the Floody Midwest Edition

The annual escape from Tucson in June commences tomorrow; we hop the train in Flagstaff and head east and hope the railroad bridges in southwestern Iowa are still intact. The family is converging on a small state park in southern Indiana that has been our hearts' home for the past eighty years or so. Unfortunately, it's also located smack dab in the middle of the worst flooding Indiana has seen, ever. The park itself is up on a hill above the White River, but we buy our beer in the little town of Spencer, which is at the bottom of the hill and now under the White River. Hundreds of people have been evacuated so far. The river was expected to crest last night and recede through this week, but more storms are rolling in on Friday, right before we turn up.

McCormick's Creek usually looks like this:

A mellow little waterfall.

This is what it looked like last week:


Less so.

Anyway. Should we come through the floodwaters unscathed, I have an additional week and a half in the Chicago area, most of which is likely to be spent playing cards and drinking wine on my aunt and uncle's back porch. Intermittent nature, culture, and drunken birdwatching posting from Chicago is possible in a couple of weeks, but given the current sorry state of our laptop's modem, it may be a check-back-in-July kind of deal.