Storm Chaser

"Are you a storm chaser?"
I looked over to see a guy in a pickup watching me take photographs as I waited for a tornado to arrive. I laughed. That's really funny. I'm actually nervous about getting to the tornado shelter in time but can't resist taking some photos first of this town Checotah, a wide spot in the road about two hours east of Oklahoma City. It turns out this is where Carrie Underwood, a country singer who won one of the American Idol shows was born and raised.

This leg of my journey from Atlanta to Oklahoma began when I picked up my friend Carol Monday morning from her friends' home in Roswell Georgia where she had been visiting. Carol had heard about Hot Springs, Arkansas with it's healing baths, so we decided to make Bill Clinton's boyhood home our first stop, a drive that took ten hours through Georgia, Tennessee and finally into Arkansas.

I have a renewed appreciation of Bill Clinton's achievements after seeing this small impoverished town.

Since Hot Springs didn't turn out to be a place we wanted to stay, the next morning we got back in the car to drive through Arkansas and into Oklahoma. Here are some photos of the countryside in Arkansas.

Arkansas cows


In this picture you can see the beautiful Ouachita mountains

Arkansas landscape

Here are some photos of a charming coffee shop in Fort Smith Arkansas where we had lunch. A salad was $4.50 for mostly lettuce. For an additional 45 cents we could also have home-baked roasted chicken on top of the salad. That wasn't a hard choice to make!

We had planned to drive all the way into Oklahoma City, but when the skies looked ominous and the weather report said that the worst storm in three years was coming through with tornadoes, we waited it out in a tornado shelter for a couple of hours with two other travelers from the road, Anna and Julie. Julie is visiting from South Korea. No tornadoes came through our area -- only 60 mile an hour winds with plenty of lightening and rain.

Julie

After a couple of hours, we got back on the road. Here are a couple of photos from our stay in Checotah.

A coal train passing through

This is Carol, my storm-chaser buddy

and this is me