October 18, 2004

October 18, 2004

Hartford, Kentucky to exit 58, Interstate 55, Southeast Missouri

DAY 123

 

WOW ! What an exciting day. We dodged a tornado in Kentucky, got a flat tire just after crossing the Mississippi River from Kentucky into Missouri, then experienced ( and survived ! ) a tornado in an RV !

Yesterday I finished sanding, then painted my fibreglass repair. It's far short of perfect, but looks at least as good as I expected it would. It looks like what it is. An "auto body" repair done by an inexperienced amateur.

This morning as we prepared to leave the Ohio County Fairground / Campground, it was raining heavily, with a strong wind. We drove a short distance west on Hwy. 69, then a short distance south on Hwy. 231 back to the Western Kentucky Parkway. West on the Parkway until it was time to stop for lunch. We took an exit and found ourselves in hillbilly country. Decrepit, old mobile homes, '81 Chevy Citations or pickup trucks painted in camouflage colours in the yards, rocking chairs on the porches, toothless old women peering out their front windows at us trying to back the rig into a narrow driveway to turn around and get back onto the Parkway. We went another 10 miles or so down the road and took another exit into Eddyville, or as Joanne named it, Nowheresville, Kentucky. We parked in the parking lot of an old, decrepit motel to have lunch. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. As we were having lunch, dark, menacing clouds rolled in suddenly, and we ate lunch watching a fantastic display of fork lightning all around us. As we drove away after lunch, we got about 4 miles down the road and entered a thunderstorm with extremely heavy rain, that only lasted about 5 minutes. We turned on the radio, and 8 minutes later the radio reported that a tornado had just blown through Eddyville about 4 minutes earlier. Holy shit !

The weather quickly improved, for the second time. We drove uneventfully to the western end of the Western Kentucky Parkway, then got on I-24 west to Paducah, Kentucky. At Paducah, where the Interstate turned north, we took Hwy. 60 west towards Missouri. On the map it looked like a fairly major highway, but turned out to be a very narrow 2 lane road with no shoulders, again through hillbilly territory. At the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi River, we crossed the extremely narrow 2 bridges over the 2 very large rivers and we were in Missouri.

Dee-Dee was desperately low on fuel by this time. There hadn't been a service station with diesel for quite some time. Hwy. 60 soon joined I-57, and we stopped to fill up with diesel. While filling up, I noticed Dee-Dee had a flat tire on the rear. The driver's side rear was supported by just the inner tire, the outer tire was flat. I was able to fill it with air, and ascertain that the problem was a leaking valve stem. I got directions to the nearest tire repair shop, about 5 miles down the Interstate, and we drove there quickly. The tire shop was closed, and appeared out of business < sigh >. Story of my life ! I unhitched the trailer, jacked up the truck, removed the tire with the leaking valve, installed the spare, lowered the truck, and re-hitched the trailer in the parking lot. Joanne dealt with Toby's "accident" inside the trailer. He hasn't been quite right the last few days, since the deworming. While waiting for me to finish, she checked our maps, and found that there was a Flying J not too far down the road, only about 10 miles off our intended route. We decided to head to the Flying J to see if they could replace the valve stem, and perhaps we would spend the night in their parking lot, although that wasn't what we had planned for tonight. As we left the parking lot where I changed the tire, and got back onto the Interstate, we noticed really, really ugly clouds rolling in from the south. We were headed about 5 more miles west, then detouring about 10 miles south to the Flying J, right where these clouds seemed to be. Suddenly the radio was sounding an alarm, followed by a tornado warning. "Damaging winds, heavy rain, heavy hail, and deadly lightning ... if outdoors, seek cover" for the next 45 minutes for the area we were in. We rushed to the Flying J. So did everybody else. It was like rush hour getting into the Flying J. Every trucker, and every RV'er in the vicinity had headed for Flying J.

I wasn't able to get the tire fixed at Flying J. We settled in to begin preparing supper, when the rain began. A few minutes of light rain, then a few minutes of heavy rain. Then ... for about 30 seconds, the wind blew so hard the trailer was rocking heavily from side to side. The rain fell so hard visibility was zero. The rain was falling horizontally because of the wind ! ! ! After about 30 seconds, it was over. The wind subsided quickly, followed within a minute or two by the rain. In a couple of minutes, no wind, no rain, nothing ! Just wet ground. And a lot of scared cattle in a nearby truck howling loudly. Teddy had hidden underneath the bed slide and needed to be coaxed out. Toby hadn't seemed to notice.

We turned on the 12V TV to see if there was any information. The local network that we could pick up on the little TV was broadcasting a constant warning on the screen about tornado warnings and flood warnings for the area we were in, in Southeast Missouri, the Southwest Kentucky area we had come from, Northeast Arkansas, about half an hour southwest of us, and Northwest Tennessee, about half an hour southeast of us.

I'm typing this at 9:30 P.M. in the driver's lounge inside the Flying J. I'm going back to the trailer at 10:00 P.M to see the local news with more information about the damage that the tornado caused to nearby homes.

DSK