If you leave Houston early enough, you can drive to Branson, Missouri, in about eleven hours. There are all sorts of problems with that, and not least that going to Branson is kind of a dubious life choice. According to Google Maps, it’s about a 10-hour drive, and Google maps doesn’t account for things like filling up with gas and eating lunch and walking the dogs and going to the bathroom, so you have to tack on another hour or so to the trip. Some of that time is made up by our mild speeding, but to get there by 3:00, we would have needed to have left by 4 in the morning. That was vaguely my goal, and I’m not sure why, except that I was excited to be on the road. We left home after 6:00.

The route is peculiar. It takes you into the edge of Shreveport, Louisiana, then around Texarkana. After that you drive northeast on I-30 to Little Rock. I-30 in Arkansas is a terrible place to drive. To go anywhere, say from Connecticut to Massachusetts, 18-wheelers are legally required to drive through Arkansas on I-30. It’s a pretty state, and would be a pleasant state to drive through if it weren’t for all those trucks. Well that and the tornadoes.

We were using Apple Maps for the route, and early morning in East Texas we started getting wind warnings. Suddenly the map would go black and there would be a warning:

It’s really windy outside, and the National Weather Service has issued wind warnings for right about where you’re standing. Be sure and hang onto your hat. Press the Screen to ignore this message.

So a couple or three times between Houston and Hope, Arkansas, I pressed the screen so we could get back to the book we were listening to and ignore the wind warnings. Later, around Hot Springs, Kris was driving and I was napping, and we started getting warnings like this:

The National Weather Service has been watching your progress, and they are concerned that you’re ignoring their wind warnings. They’re upping the ante. As of now, this is a Tornado Watch. Look out your car window. See those ominous clouds to the west? Keep watch, and if you see a tornado, get off the road. Don’t fiddle around. Get out of the car and find a low spot and hang onto your hat. Press the screen to ignore this message, but it’d probably be better if you didn’t.

Well. That got our attention and we watched the clouds plenty. I googled what to do if we were caught in a tornado.

Get out of your car. Avoid trees. Find a low spot and lay down with your hands covering your head. There’s going to be debris, and anyway you’ll want to hold onto your hat. Don’t stop under an overpass because like as not it will be a wind tunnel and you’ll blow all the way to Branson.

So now in addition to watching for tornadoes, I was looking for likely low spots, of which there were plenty, but this was Arkansas, and there weren’t many low spots free of trees. At Benton, just southwest of Little Rock, the tornado watch was upgraded to a tornado warning, and then as we were driving through Little Rock it was upgraded to a Tornado Emergency and we got this:

What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you nuts? The sky is full of lightning, the clouds are swirling, and there is a tornado touching down right here, right now. Get off the road, you nitwit! Take shelter! Forget your damned hat and if you’ve got one wear a helmet! Ignore this message and you deserve what you get!

We were at a highway exit so Kris took it, drove past a Kroger’s on the left and into an office park a little further on the right. She parked, but I was still looking for a likely low place and spotted a daycare center doorway sheltered by a retaining wall at the lowest part of the lot, so she moved the car to park next to the daycare.

We got out of the car just as the emergency warning sirens started howling. The daycare door was locked, and inside it was dark. Then of a sudden there were tree branches flying into the sky and water blowing around the sides of the building in horizontal sheets. We lay on the sidewalk between the building and the retaining wall, thankfully out of the worst of the wind and the rain, with Kris laying on our two dogs and me laying on Kris.

Debris flew, the wind howled, the sirens blared, the rain rained. . . Then the door opened and the daycare owner yelled get in here, right now, and we did.

Man, do I love that lady.

It turned out that it wasn’t a daycare, but a play space for toddlers, and it all looked pretty fun to me. By then I guess I was highly suggestible. Back to that earlier warning though, the one where Apple Maps told us to get off the road if we saw a tornado, how did they expect us to see a tornado when all you can see in the midst of the actual thing is flying rain and debris? I did steal this dandy photo from CBS News:

I figure we spent about half of the tornado laying on that sidewalk, and about half of it in the the Wonder Place, but the part on the sidewalk sure seemed longer. All things being equal, inside the play center was better. The National Weather Service clocked winds of 165 miles per hour. People died.

It didn’t really take long for the storm to blow over, and after it stopped we walked around the parking lot and gaped at flipped cars and downed trees, and then across the lot here comes the play space lady leading a half-dozen dogs she’d rescued from a pet groomers. If you need some good karma, just go stand next to that lady and let some rub off. I think right now she’s got about an extra year’s supply. And if you’re the parent of toddlers in Little Rock, I can highly recommend The Wonder Place Playspace for your kids. It is a little refuge in a world of toil and woe, and the owner may be our favorite person ever.

It was just as well by the way that we had moved the car down earlier, because it looked to me like a tree had parked in the space that we vacated.

After the worst of it we sat in the car for a while in the parking lot of The Wonder Place and listened to Little Rock radio. It was all weather, all the time. We went back inside when another squall blew through, but that was just some hard rain and a little wind, and it didn’t last long. When we were certain that the storm was out of Little Rock and moving northeast, we took off northwest.

That Kroger parking lot on the other side of the road? It was a mess. Flipped cars, smashed store fronts, ripped off roofs . . .

I’m glad we didn’t stop at that Kroger’s. We could have easily stopped at Kroger’s. If it had been on our right instead of our left when we came off the freeway we almost certainly would have stopped there. Avoiding crowded parking lots should probably be added to the list of things to do if you’re caught outside in a tornado.

On the highway there wasn’t much traffic on our side of the road, not even trucks, though on the other side going the opposite way cars were backed up for miles. Apparently traffic was blocked at the interchange where we had first exited. Damage to the overpass? Flipped cars? I don’t know, and it seems like something I should have known to come full circle. We didn’t go back to find out.

A few hours later, up in the Ozarks, everything was bright and sunny.

We got to Branson and made it to our restaurant reservation at the Keeter Center at the College of the Ozarks. It’s student run, and it was fine, but I surely wouldn’t have minded a drink. It’s a conservative Christian institution though, and they don’t serve alcohol. I drank a lot of iced tea.

This post isn’t really about Missouri, is it? It’s not really about fishing, either. We did fish in Missouri. The day after the tornado we had booked a float trip for trout on the White River in Branson, but when we met our guide at River Run Outfitters, he said that the river was too high, and that winds on the river were gusting up to 40 miles per hour. We decided that we’d had about enough wind, and they were happy to refund our deposit.

He recommended that we go to Roaring River State Park, and made suggestions about flies and how to fish the river. I caught a couple of rainbow trout there. The next day we went to Crane Creek–which I highly recommend–and Kris caught one and I caught a couple more. Other than that I haven’t got a lot of recommendations, except to avoid Little Rock when it’s windy, and to do what your Apple Maps tells you.