Yikes! Fires

So I'm on my way to the airport to fly out to Tennessee and the freeway had a lot of stopped traffic. So I tell my husband lets take this route (a different one) and so we did. I could not miss my flight, it's a business trip. As we started down the new route the police have that blocked, so we double back and hit the freeway. What we didn't know is that taking this route put us in front of the road block and off we went. Apparently, the police forgot to block that part as well. This is our journey. I do apologize for the blurred pictures but I didn't have my normal camera and these were taken with a camera phone.


A first we were wow and how beautiful.









Shortly we realized we were about to drive right through the fire. The fire had jumped the freeway and we were surrounded. It was breathtaking. Then the burning embers were flying right past the windshield and we could feel the heat from the fire on the windshield. There was only a couple of other cars on the road with us and hazzard lights were turned on and we slowed to a 20 mph crawl. We couldn't see much more than 2 feet in front of us. You could smell the smoke and I became a little nervous. You could see new fires burning on the side of the freeway and I was hoping we weren't going to get stuck. The freeway was block from every route that could lead into this freeway.

We made it but wow. When I made it to Chicago, I watched the news and the fires are still out of control. I called my husband to see if he made it back home, he did but it took him 4.5 hours to get home, it would normally only take 1 hour. But all is well with him.