Rain Showers

So, we have had some light rain showers on and off here for the past few hours...Okay, so we have had almost 10 inches of rain in 24 hours.  It has rained non-stop and it has been a heavy rain for 24 hours.  Our sump pump is working overtime and we are trying not to go stir crazy with 6 people cooped up in our small house.  This is the first day that I can ever remember that any schools in our county have been sent home early because of rain (snow...yes, fog...yes, rain...not until today), but Gavin's school was not one of those - they do not close for anything.  So, we did venture out this afternoon to go pick Gavin up from school and got some pictures of the surrounding area and all of the flooding going on right now.

Waterway - that never has water in it...except for today.

River over its banks - A LOT!

This is someones yard that you can usually see their huge garden in.  Today, no garden...

but there were some floating pumpkin remains...

and some more pumpkins/goards and sunflowers.

These next pictures are all pictures of what is normally dry land (we are the one county in the land of 10,000 lakes that DOES NOT even have a lake).  All of the waterways, ditches and fields became lakes today just trying to contain the runoff.

We made two attempts to get to town before we found an okay route to take.  The first one ended up with us turning around when we spotted this...

and out second also resulted in us turning around when we spoted another road washed out...

Why yes, that is a tractor and a combine sitting in water up to almost the tops of their big tires.

More pictures of areas that should not have any water, let alone a whole lake.

It was almost impossible to get around the town of Owatonna where Gavin goes to school.  A trip home that should have taken 25 minutes total, took us 25 minutes to just get out of town, let alone the other 20 minutes of the drive.  There are two MAJOR roads through town and both were closed as the rivers were completely over both sides of the road on both major roads.  So that made for a LOT of traffic on the little side streets with lots of stop signs and traffic lights.  Not a pretty picture driving in town today.

And yet, more lakes...I mean ditches and fields.

And this poor man lost his driveway and his culvert.

Waterway, why yes, it is

It looks like this person is actually in the water but they are not.  We were following them into town and came over a hill to find this.  So, they were turning around.  We learned from their mistake and turned around before getting right up to the water.  Jed came through this area after work and the wayer was not going over the road anymore but part of the road was missing so he too had to make two attemps to find a way home...third time was a charm.

Another river over its banks.