by Pa Rock
Road Warrior
We left Goldsboro, North Carolina, at 8:30 this morning and arrived in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis, at 8:30 this evening - which made for one long damned day in the car! We didn't set out to follow the "Elvis Trail" - Tupelo was just where we happened to be when everyone was too tired to go on!
Our trip along the southern route added four more states to our list for this trip, making a total of nine: Missouri, Illinois (for less than a mile), Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Tomorrow we will start out a little later and head to Memphis where we hope to explore Beale Street for awhile before heading home to West Plains, Missouri. Tim and Erin and their family will go back to their home in Kansas later in the evening - along with my daughter, Molly - and Molly will fly back to Oregon on Tuesday morning - trip accompli!
Memphis? Maybe we are following the "Elvis Trail" after all!
It had just started raining when we pulled into Tupelo, forcing us to unpack the car in a downpour. Tim and his sister soon took off to a local grocery store for some supplies while the rest of us started unpacking and getting comfortable. But instead of things leveling out and gravitating to normal after a long, hard day on the road, a crisis arose. Weather alerts started going off on our phones, and the town tornado sirens began wailing. A big tornado had been spotted twenty miles away and was headed in our direction!
The motel, of course, had no basement, so we gathered in a fairly solid stairwell and waited out the weather emergency. Molly got on the phone with her husband in Oregon who gave weather updates from the weather channel, one of the other hotel guest had a local weather station on her phone, another guest was tuned to a different weather channel on his phone, and everyone in our party - except me - seemed tuned to an array of sources and electronic devices. It was an amazing circus of technology! After a bit less than an hour in the stairwell, the various tech experts agreed that the funnel seemed to have gone past (or perhaps over) our location - and we all adjourned back to our rooms.
If there is a round two later tonight, I'm not playing. The old curmudgeon needs his damned beauty sleep!
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