Actually, Steve, you are wrong on the seasons. We have 3 weeks of flooding, 3 months of mosquitos and road construction, 2 weeks of trying to salvage what we can from the garden, then 7 months of shoveling white stuff.
Why do we have a basement? Simple... somewhere to hide from tornados, indoor swimming for a few weeks, and a place to keep the furnace. Seriously, though... it doesn't normally flood to this extent. The last few years have been waaay wetter than normal (normally we are almost in a drought or in one).
Today I decided to drive out to the base... sunny skies, clear road, just cruising along. Then I saw the sign... 'Road Closed Ahead'. I figured since it was an asphalt road, they will probably have detour signs so I kept going. Then, just beyond somebodies driveway, barricades. No detour. There wasn't water on the road, but it did look like the asphalt was crumbling. I turned around, and turned off on a gravel road. Large puddles in the roads, turn here and there when the signs ahead said Road Closed. Then top a hill and the road at the bottom looked like a lake. Turn around, drive back through the swampy puddles that were supposed to be the road, and decided that doing a detour on the back roads wasn't going to work. I was about 20 miles from home when I got to the first closed road, by the time I back tracked to find another paved road I was about 3 miles from home. Funny, I didn't see much flooding around the roads that I normally take, so I really didn't know how bad it was. There are a lot of base folks in the town before I got to the closed road, their 17 mile trip to work is now close to 40 miles. Instead of 34 miles round trip, it's close to 80? That's got to hurt, especially with gas prices up. I wonder when the farmers will be able to get out there to plant? A lot of the fields look like lakes.
