Weddings, Tornados, & Lightning! Oh my!

Saturday was quite a day. We planned on attending Josh & Rachel Haugo's wedding in Lake Mills, IA, so I drove up to DSM Friday night to see Jon. He had just moved into a new place and misplaced the wedding invitation, and being the over-prepared person I am, I had previously looked up the information online. So we printed off the wedding detail information from theknot.com.

On Saturday we got a good early start and picked up one of Jon's friends in Ames on the way to Lake Mills. According to the internet, the wedding was at 4:00 p.m. We made the 2.25 hour journey and we were set to arrive about 45 minutes early. About 2 miles before our exit on the south-bound side of interstate it appeared that the state patrol was doing some sort of a road block. So that got us all excited and talking about fugitives on the loose or Josh disappearing before the wedding...

When we pulled up to the church, it was crazy, because we were a good 45 minutes early and there were tons of cars there. Jon was in the midst of putting on his dress shirt and it started to rain pretty hard. We waited a couple minutes and all of a sudden a sheriff sped up, ran into the church, ran out and sped away. That, coupled with the road block, made us really start to wonder what was going on. When there was finally a break in the rain, we decided to run into the church. We found the entryway was full of people waiting and watching the weather. We asked what was going on and found out the sheriff had warned the wedding guests about tornados in the area. All the boys were watching the wall clouds that were a couple miles away! I thought it was so crazy that all of these people were there so early. One of my friends, Katelyn shortly spotted me and after chatting briefly said something like, "Did you just get here?"

It wasn't until a couple seconds later that I asked, "Wait... when is the wedding?"

It had started at 3:00, not 4:00 like it had said on the internet and was over by the time we got there! So we missed the wedding! I think we were all really disappointed.

We stayed outside for a bit and watched the wall cloud, we saw two funnel clouds drop, crazy amounts of wind, and when the cloud rotation was directly overhead, I decided it was time to head toward the church basement. Although, I couldn't persuade Jon to join me and he kept persisting that I "Go find Katelyn"... meaning let him watch the fun boy stuff and stop whining.

It didn't look like the rain would let up anytime soon, so we ran through the rain and headed toward the reception at Diamond Jo's Casino Event Center. All the decorations and flowers were beautiful at the reception. Her colors were black and green and she used all of my current favorite flowers. The bridesmaid's bouquets were white calla lily's and white/green roses. At each table there were 3 green spider mums (my absolute fav right now). And she had a cute candy table with white and green candy in large hurricane vases. I wish I would have had my camera, because everything was simple, elegant and perfect.

Jon and I had planned on driving back to Ankeny that night yet, so around 10:00 pm we left the reception and headed home. We saw the most brilliant lightning show I have ever seen. Most of the lightning was in the clouds, but it was very veiny-looking and seemed to be hundreds of miles long. We had a constant strobe on the way home because of the lightning. It was definitely better than fireworks, the only scary part is we were driving through some pretty strong wind and rain. Which I then drove through more strong wind and rain again Sunday afternoon on the way to KC... crazy weather these days!