DAY 1 (Friday, June 25)...

Our flight wasn't until after 9pm...and then it was delayed.

We drove to Terry & Theresa's place - our MINI friends that live in Taylor and are willing to be our free "parking service".  We visited long enough to take a tour of their garden.  Very unique plants and interesting garden art.  Ideas...Ideas.

While flying over the Iowa/South Dakota border, we encountered a very long, very tall electrical storm.  Here's a video I found of the storm that someone took from the ground.

We have a similar video, only from above:

We flew next to it for over 45 minutes.  It was beautiful and scary at the same time.  The lightning just never seemed to stop; flying from one end of the row of clouds to the other.  Good thing we were 50-100 miles away from it.

Jerome took a picture of the satellite map on the plane so that we would know exactly where it was.  That was a great idea because it helped me find the video above.  The person who posted the video said...

this electrical storm was entering Aurelia at approximately 10:43pm. The video is long and the quality may not be that good. However, you can appreciate the lightning. As the electrical storm passed over Aurelia, there was no rain, no wind nor thunder. Later that night, we heard in Aurelia about the possible rotation near Cherokee.

I assume that by "rotation" they mean a tornado.

We landed alright and headed by shuttle to our hotel by the airport.  It was very late for us since we had just left EST and now we were in PST; which is a 3 hour difference.