Braving the

Speeding

Through

L

ife

Our vacation to Wisconsin Dells was short-lived but it was fantastic nonetheless. We got to experience a myriad of things that were nostalgic and yet other things that we hadn’t done before.

We went hiking through a nature reserve near Mirror Lake, after already hiking a loop that supposedly was going to show us Witches’ Gultch (it in fact did not lead us there and instead we walked through a normal Wisconsin forest). That was on Saturday. My birthday was on Sunday so while hiking around four miles on Saturday I told my family that I was leaving this hiking junk in my 27th year.

We also did mini golfing, went to the races at Dells Raceway Park, ate at a few restaurants, walked downtown and went to a dueling pianos concert at the bar dubbed, “The Grateful Shed.”

The concert was an extravagant display of musical talent as two gentlemen went back and forth singing, playing piano solos and engaging the crowd for close to three hours.

The only thing I had on my must do list for the weekend was to go to the drive-in theater to watch the new Mission Impossible movie. We had that planned for Friday night however, the weather did not cooperate. We saw it was going to storm with a potential for severe weather so we decided to go to the dueling pianos event instead.

While we were watching the show, the outdoor patio started to clear out as the clouds and winds rolled in. The three garage doors that opened up the establishment to the outdoor patio were closed by employees as the music kept on rolling. In a matter of minutes, the storm had rolled in and rain started coming in sideways against the glass garage doors.

While in the middle of a song, everyone in the packed house received an update on their phones saying that a tornado warning was in effect for our area. We quickly glanced outside to see that the storm’s intensity had picked up with constant lightning and punishing winds.

Yet, the show rolled on. At one point, the performers asked rhetorically if they should stop the show but they quickly kept on playing. A loud boom was heard and the main power to the building went out with auxiliary power kicking on with about half of the lighting of the original scene.

There was a brief pause in the music as the performers were in the middle of performing a song, but even with the audio equipment failing, the crowd stepped in and sang the tune until the power could be turned back on to the singers’ equipment.

Was it the safest thing in the world? Probably not. But it was a blast nonetheless and I think the best thing that could have happened was the storm. Without the storm, we would have been watching Tom Cruise jump off a motorcycle in midair instead of witnessing a great performance by the piano players and the crowd.