Crazy Weather, Long Car Rides, Home

Well, we are back in Montana. We had to kick and scream to get here but we did it - in about 26 hours. So, I'm sure you have heard about the weather Oklahoma City and most of the central states got. KOCO TV in Oklahoma City has a slideshow of some of the damage. It really looked like a war zone. I am not sure I have ever seen anything like it before. The ice did not stop Cafe Evoke Catering, however, from serving the best in specialty coffee at our last scheduled event. While the turnout may have not been what our host was expecting, we did have a great time and met many new friends. As you can see from the photos above, there was quite a bit of ice on the trailer and car. You can imagine what the rest of the place looked like. My parents (where we were staying) lost power and got lucky to get it back 2 days later. At one point, there were about 500,000 people without power. Many still are in the dark. I also hear that Tulsa Oklahoma got it even worse that Oklahoma City. They have begun the clean up process and it looks like this storm is heading towards Ohio. We had interesting weather on our way back. When we left Oklahoma City, there was ice on the ground and a thunder storm that brought heavy rains as we left. We drove through rain for several hours and then it turned to sleet and freezing rain and the roads turned bad. For most of the trip we were driving between 35 and 50 on ice/snow packed roads, frozen windshield wipers, and wind. We then got into the thickest fog I have ever driven through. There were semi trucks in the ditch everywhere and it was messy. We finally rolled into Denver Colorado 15 hours later and backed the trailer in so that we could unhook our car and put it in our friends garage. I put the key into the lock that keeps the trailer on the car and it broke off inside the lock so we could not put our car into the garage. The bad thing about this was that our espresso machine was in our car and we did not want it to freeze. So, we blasted the heater in the car, put blanks and pillows all around the machine, and then closed it up for the night. I put a bottle of water in the car as well as a "tester" and the next morning all was fine. We got a bit lucky. We set out yesterday morning for Bozeman and it took us awhile to get on to I-25. Once we did, we got through traffic in town and were on our way. We then hit a huge back up. There was an accident right outside Denver that put us back about 45 minutes. We got through it and headed on. The roads were great we were finally moving. Then, we hit Wyoming. The roads instantly got bad, there were 45 mph wind gusts and it slowed us down again. We finally rolled into Bozeman around 10:00 last night and were glad to be home. We are catering tonight so there is not much rest for us. We had a good trip and I will report on our findings in the coming days. ...be bold Tagged: cafe evoke, coffee catering, coffee, espresso, tea, Oklahoma city, Oklahoma