I’m finally back! After a few crazy weeks!  I’ve never gone that long without writing. It took me a few days to figure out how to log into my WordPress from the road, mostly because my passwords were buried underneath a ton of stuff in the back of the truck.

And now I’m typing this in the car connected to the Internet. Sending info to space and back from the truck from somewhere around Topeka, KS. Amazing.

We are on our 4th day cross country to the Hemlock Inn.  Brett has been driving mostly because I am a disaster with the trailer.  It starts swaying when I drive it.  The truck even flashed “sway alert” at me a few times.  I could drive it all by myself and I’d be fine but something about having people in the car causes stage fright:

I meant to write the past few days but the cell coverage has just been really spotty and then I couldn’t remember my password it had been so long.  Then yesterday as I was trying to wrap up a post: TORNADO.

What are the odds that we run into a Tornado?! I kept looking at the doppler and all the weather was way north until a small patch just appeared on the screen suddenly.  Like a bad dream. We had just gotten into Kansas and we were relieved that all the bad weather seemed to be north of us. We were in the middle of nowhere, and it was beautiful:

Then somewhere along the way….where there was literally no civilization for miles and miles…I was teaching Boo how to pee on the side of the road…and she burned her bum tailpipe. (of all the places to sit down she sat down against the tailpipe?!) Before we started out again I took a photo of the clouds and sunset behind us:

Slowly, for about an hour, the clouds were starting to rotate and form a wall:

YES I TOOK THIS PHOTO. IT LOOKS LIKE A MOVIE SCENE.

Brett: That looks circular to me.

Me: I think we might be okay. Anyway, if that was a tornado it would be about a category F100.  That thing is huge.

But then as I watched it I wasn’t so sure.  I crawled across the seats to get a better look of the clouds and what looked like little finger like funnels forming off of it.  It looked like we were in front of it and from the animated radar I pulled up on my phone it seemed like we were too.

As we pulled through the small town of Lakin and just as we did the radio started emitting the emergency broadcast signal.

“a tornado has touched down in Lakin”

Me: We are IN Lakin. That is the tornado!

We kept going because there was no place to take shelter but as the road turned north we soon found ourselves in the middle of it.  Everything was purple and just like the movie Twister farm debris was moving across the road. It was chaos as we tried to determine the best plan of action. Then suddenly we passed a gas station and it gave us an option. and Brett flipped a u-turn and we headed back.

We pulled into the parking lot with the trailer. The only sign of life was an 18 wheeler with its lights on.  I grabbed the dog and Brett grabbed Boo. Boo was so scared she began vomiting all over the pavement. That’s when I snapped this photo:

We left the truck and the trailer in the middle of the parking lot and ran to the door. The gas station had already been locked down…a woman came to the door and quickly unlocked it. Inside she directed us to a small janitor’s closet. The tornado alarms kept going off every few minutes.  The locked doors began to shake and hiss and squeal and we stayed there until it all quieted down. And my life flashed before my eyes and I pictures all of ouse being sucked up into a tornado as the building disappeared around us. And we just prayed that God would keep us safe.

And he did. Thank you God.

And today, except for some hail damage to the truck windshield, everything is back to normal again.

The crazy thing is a few days ago I had an eerie premonition of trying to outrun a tornado. In a matter of a few days we traded earthquake country for tornado country. The difference is that I know exactly what to do in an earthquake… but not in a tornado.

More tomorrow.