Day 14

Thursday April 14th 2011
Kansas City,KS or MO

Well please accept the appology at this time. My trusty laptop may have bit the final bullet today which will make my blog post quite a bit shorter and less picturized.

Today was a very challenging day, let me just start off by saying that I am safe and sound in Kansas City. I feel that is important to state because of the weather I encountered today. Leaving pueblo was fine for about an hour, then it started to snow which really didnt bother me at all. But then it started to accumulate and the road started to get a little ugly. Speed dropped anD it was just a case of leaving lots of distance and driving carefully. An hour of that went by in no time and I was out of the worst of it.

As I was standing in Burlington, Colorado filling the car there was a little but if snow on the ground but not much. I noticed the interstate to my left was a little empty but just blamed the weather. With the tank full I was just about to go when all of the sudden there it was... Aside from the abandon ship warning I have heard before this was the second most horrifying thing I have heard. The whine of a siren, not just a regular police siren that we hear day to day, the type of siren used to alert the whole town of something bad. When you are on the great plains, there is really only one thing it could be...a tornado siren. I froze, I have not been trained to deal with this is all I could think, so I went inside. The woman working told me not to worry as it was just a test scheduled for today... Wow thanks for the heart attack.

After setting out onto the road again the sky cleared up and it got warm just long enough to forget the events from earlier. And then it changed again, the sky got dark, like the kind of dark usually reserved for nightfall. The wind picked up and the rain started, followed by the lightning. None of that was that bad, but then without warning it got bad. Cars pulled over left and right, the lightning was right above us, the hail was the size of quarters. I pulled over but was still being rocked by the weather, so I pulled forward and hid in the wind shadow of a semi. ( thank you truckers). As the night continued I had the radio going and it seemed where I was, was where the storm was worst. Tornado warnings, severe thunderstorms and hail for 3 hours is tiring. Kenny Rodgers sang " you got to know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em". I was pretty close to folding them and finding a place to wait out the storm.

But I didn't, and thank goodness I didn't or I never would have made it to "Oklahoma Joes BBQ" I'm KC. Most amazing meal I have ever eaten and I will leave it at that.

Okay, so longer than I expected but it needed to be told the right way.

Song of the day. Either the entire Pink Floyd Collection or Colder Weather by Zac Brown Band.

Cheers.