Evelynn Starr

It’s Monday in the mid-west and today we are another almost 1,100 miles older and wiser. We are in Dorothy’s Kansas, and look, there’s even a rest stop along the side of the Interstate reserved for Toto to go do his business!

“Hydrant non-functional”??? But… what if there’s a fire?

So we arrived safe in Topeka after braving weather phenomena rarely seen in parts east. Indiana, Illinois and Missouri (and probably Kansas and Nebraska and Oklahoma) are weather central for powerful forces of nature that – when experienced – make you actually believe a little girl’s weirdo story about a tornado and a place called Oz.

In fact, driving along US36 westbound yesterday into a wall of black, an automated weather report broke into regular radio programming. It warned of tornadoes in Counties X, Y and Z, and that a “severe and damaging thunderstorm” had just passed the town of A, heading northwestward on a direct path to the town of B. Clueless as I was and having never actually set foot in Missouri before, I picked up our Rand Mcnally 2015 Road Atlas (a.k.a. the bible of all road-trips) and attempted to locate the affected areas.

To my shock I realized that we were headed straight through them.

I suppose this should have been a dead giveaway….

What happened next (with the wipers on high speed) looked like this.

Whoa.

So that’s what it feels like when a storm passes through around here. OK, I get it now.

(You know, you sit on your sofa in Boston or Philadelphia or someplace and watch this stuff on the evening TV news and wonder what all the fuss is about. Actually traveling through something like that can be rather unsettling if not downright terrifying.)

But this story has a happy ending. Waiting for us on the other side were….

… a chilled drink…

… and a hot grill.

Nothing like a well-earned pit-stop with great old friends, fantastic local grass-fed beef and some strong liquor to take the edge off.

After all she went through, Dorothy probably also could have used a shot or two.