This is a story about my dad and I embarking on an interesting journey through southeast Nebraska to some interesting caches. We decided to do some caching south of Lincoln, Nebraska on a nice Sunday afternoon. I had finally solved a puzzle cache, Carleenp's Key West cache, and Dad was taking me to find the cache.

We also thought that we might see some tornado or flood damage from the violent storms that ripped through the area the night before (you might have heard about Hallam, a town that was completely destroyed, on the news or the Weather Channel), but little did we realize how much of a hazard that was going to be. We found Key West, and started off for Carleen's Spring Creek Nature Cache. It was about 25 miles away from our Key West parking spot, and should have been a fairly easy drive. We started noticing wind damage after about 10 miles. On one highway, there was metal siding and corrugated steel strewn all over the place. Then we drove through a house.

This was easier than it might usually have been, because the remains of the house were around on both sides of the road. The house was literally exploded. There were siding and debris from the house, and perhaps the remains of a shed or a barn, spread over at least a mile. All of the trees in the area were stripped down to their trunks. Other houses had their roofs ripped off. We were able to drive through though, because the roads had already been cleared.

The real hazard to navigation was Salt Creek, which was also on both sides of the road, and unfortunately, over the road. It was over Roca Road, and Saltillo Road, and Yankee Hill Road, and other roads for which I don't even have names. Every road we tried was closed by flood waters, which were deep and fast enough to wash a car away if anyone tried to drive through them. The 25-mile drive from Key West to the Spring Creek Prairie ended up taking us about 2 hours, as we had to drive to the nearest city, Lincoln, to find a bridge that was still open.

We finally made it to the Spring Creek Prairie and found the cache. Spring Creek, at least, had decided not to flood. The hunt for the cache was fairly easy--getting there was the hard part. When leaving the cache, we took the long way home to see if there was any more tornado damage or flooding, but we didn't see anything major. When we got back to Omaha, we agreed that cheeseburgers were in order for our hard day's work, and then promptly went to stuff our faces.