Spring Gumbo
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A good downpour reduces visibility and makes roads slick, making driving more difficult. Fortunately, today's vehicles are prepared for such weather. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow, and this is the Weather Notebook . Before the "beauty of all-wheel drive"--long before it, in fact, a little rain could mean very long trip. Using archived tape, correspondent Curt Nickisch sheds some light on the past.

Grace Monroe was born in 1902 and grew up in eastern South Dakota, where her father was a country doctor. To make house calls, he rode horses until he could afford a Model T. In this 1976 recording, Monroe remembers how after one long winter, her family escaped cabin fever by driving to the Black Hills in western South Dakota for vacation.

MONROE: So we got started driving in this open Ford car. There were no good roads, no well-marked roads. Just, almost ruts. And we started across this prairie road. And that was really quite a trip, it took us four days to get to the Black Hills, because we had so many blowouts, and then it rained, and when it rained, those roads were just like gumbo, there was no going on them at all.

At one point they had to wait for the roads to dry by spending the night and most of the next day in the farmhouse of a family homesteading in the middle of the lonesome prairie.

MONROE: They had an organ and nobody could play that organ. And my sister was quite a musician. And she played the organ and they sang and they sang and they SANG! I'm sure it was a big event for that family to have company that stayed that long.

They made it to the Black Hills and home again, sometimes splashing through creeks that covered the ruts. Later, federal highway acts improved the roads. But navigating dirt roads through swollen creeks, spring rains and under the hot prairie sun - made vacations back then into adventures that brought people together.

Thanks today to correspondent Curt Nickisch of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And thanks to Subaru of America and the National Science Foundation for providing their generous support of the Weather Notebook. Check us out at weathernotebook.org.