Interstate Adventures

On this trip, we have become weather stalkers. Before we left three weeks ago, I monitored the weather for driving conditions. After we arrived in Minneapolis, I stalked the weather because there was supposed to be a thunderstorm with quarter-sized hail. I did not want that hitting the van. When that passed incident-free, I started focusing on the following week specifically in Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma because we were about to leave for Austin, TX and we needed to find a tornado-free, work-week stopover. 

We have fallen into the pattern of driving Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and setting up for work Monday through Thursday in one location. We have discovered a gentle rhythm in traveling with more predictability and calm as we ease in and out of new locations. 

It was Sunday and the forecast was clear driving weather for the ten-hour trip through Iowa, Kansas, arriving in Oklahoma City. We split the driving: Bruce four hours, Deanna four hours, Bruce the final two hours. 

It was toward the end of my four-hour shift just outside of Kansas City that the sky became so dark the car screen went into night mode. A trickle of rain quickly escalated until it was pouring so hard I considered pulling off the highway. The lightning that came at regular intervals, was streaking sideways, like nothing I had ever seen before. 

We could not see where exactly we were in the storm but knew we were moving south and the storm was moving east. We made the decision to keep driving through it rather than stop and wait it out. The exits were miles apart and we could not figure out which town we were passing through or what weather could lie ahead. What we did know was that we were in tornado alley. 

As I kept driving with full focus, Bruce turned on the local radio station and we heard the forecaster announce “golf ball sized hail” and a list of towns being rattled off after a tornado had touched down. Bruce searched for the towns on a map to see how close we were to them. 

The tornado had formed and touched down in a lake in Douglas County. Fortunately, it was short-lived. However, they were still notifying people to “grab your loved ones and go to the basement” until the storm passed. We kept watching the skies. Even if we saw a tornado, we did not have a basement to shelter in. 

Then as the rain let up, the traffic slowed. We drove through two separate accident sites that reminded us of how lucky we were. We could not believe how a sunny route to Oklahoma City could have changed to this threatening path. My hands relaxed a bit on the steering wheel. Even though we planned around the weather, we had no choice but to drive through the danger. As we drove underneath a blanket of gray skies, we could see blue sky ahead. Oklahoma City, our final destination, was closer.