A First for Everything!

Well here is the first. We were concerned about severe weather on our route from Texas to Oklahoma, Missouri and eventually to Indiana. We normally would never be in this area, tornado alley, at this time of the year.   Les watched the weather very carefully and we settled on going to St. Peters Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. We actually stayed at a very nice city Park, with full hookups on the lake and a 4.5 mile bike loop.  We had decided we would stay just a few days and then head up through Illinois.  The day that we had scheduled to leave was the day that severe storms were predicted, so we stayed an extra day. Later that afternoon the tornado sirens went off in the park, followed by the ranger alerting the few campers that were there to head to the storm shelter.   We shut our slides, lowered our satellite and antenna, grabbed the passports and the cash and rushed over to the comfort station, which served as the storm shelter. I don't mind saying that it was quite an anxious time, not knowing whether there was imminent danger or  if the storm would miss us. There was a couple there who had been through this two years prior at the same location and told us a couple of stories of motorhomes being picked up and moved 35 feet and a man struggling to get into the shelter flying off his feet!!  Well crisis averted, small hail and rain with a very windy evening but we were safe.  Of course now we know that Fairdale, Illinois suffered the brunt of the tornado.

Amarillo TX and Elk City OK

Spent a week in Amarillo, and as stated in the section below enjoyed touring Palo Duro Canyon, one of the places that was most enjoyed by Georgia O'Keefe.  We also had plenty of time to catch up on some shopping, post office duties and ramping up our exercise program.  There is definitely a theme in all of our adventures and even though we don't have a brick and stick we still are creatures of habit no matter where we are!!  One of our shopping excursions involved selecting the perfect Cowboy hat for Joshua.  We ended up settling on one made from Bull hide.  As of this writing he hasn't received it yet so I surely hope he loves it!  The nicest thing about these types of hats is that you can take it to another western type store (they actually have many in Florida) and have the hat steamed and custom fit to your head if it's not perfect when you put it one.  Okay maybe that's too much information so I'll move on

We decided we are officially seniors so we ate at the Big Texan for lunch!  It was really good.  We learned that the Today show will feature a segment on their 72 oz. steak eating challenge.  The record is currently held by a woman weighing in at 120 pounds and she holds the record for eating the steak, salad, roll, baked potato and shrimp cocktail in under 5 minutes!!!  Anyway she will attempt to eat 2 of these complete dinners in under 1 hour.  I think the waitress said that this would happen April 19th.

Off we went to Elk City Oklahoma which is where I write this from.  We decided that with impending severe storms we should wait until it passes before we continue on to Tulsa OK.  If time permits we would like to visit the Oklahoma Memorial (it you can believe it the 20th year anniversary is approaching this month of the bombing of the building).  If not we will add this to our bucket list for another time.