Chapter Twenty-Five
Killer Tornado
May 13, 2009—Arrow Rock to St. Louis: We didn't have any rain during the night, but we awoke to ominous clouds and scattered thunder. It was still early, and if we left immediately, we'd get to St. Louis way before Jenny woke up. So, we decided to take a quick bike ride. After changing from our "camper" clothes to our "elite cyclist" disguises, we headed off, and it felt great to be riding again.
However, when we stopped to chat with a neighboring RVer, we learned that tornadoes with baseball-sized hail were forecast. Although it would have been good for the journal to get hit by a tornado while on the bicycles (picture Dorothy’s mean neighbor floating by the window), we switched strategies from "go for a quick ride" to "get the hell out of Dodge." This turned out to be a good decision, since tornadoes did come through the area later, killing three people.
So we pushed on, and ran into the most intense rain I've ever encountered. At one point we had to pull off the highway and wait it out under an overpass. However, nothing could be as bad as the driving mishap that we once heard reported on our local news.
There is only one TV news station in Eureka, CA. It must be the least desirable station in the country, because we have a steady stream of greenhorn news anchors who apparently can’t make it anywhere else. I’m not making this up, we had one anchor with a serious speech impediment, one who didn’t speak English understandably, and one who anchored her last broadcast drunk.
The worst one, and the one who was most amusing, was the one who always mispronounced English words. Even everyday words weren’t safe, and it was obvious that this woman did not grow up on the planet Earth. We called her the “Storefront Girl,” because on one weather forecast, she told us that there were several “storefronts” moving into the area. Did she picture a Gap and a True Value Hardware clomping up Main Street? I shouldn’t make fun of her, because there were obviously some defective parts in her brain, but (1) she was hired as a news anchor and (2) it was funny.
The best mispronunciation occurred when she was reporting on a man who had driven his car off the road and into a ravine. It was reported like this: “In Southern California, a middle-aged man drove his car off the road, and spent five days in the bottom of a raven.” I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would be to spend even one day in a bird’s bottom, so with this cautionary tale in mind, we pulled off the road when the storm got too fierce.
We finally arrived at Jenny’s apartment a few hours later, and in spite of our near miss with avian rectums, she immediately put us to work packing.
Next, it was over to the hotel, check in, and sneak the bikes into the room.
This was an excellent hotel (Drury Inn)—free beer and wine at night, free long-distance calls, free Wi-Fi, and free breakfast. No leaky airbeds. Can you put a price on luxury like this? Well I can; it came to $165 for two nights.
BTW, our per-night camping fees have ranged from $7.50 to $26, averaging around $15.
After a barbecue at Jenny’s friend’s house, I lay in the car in a drunken coma while Gunilla guided Lena back to the hotel, and we slept in this thing called "a real bed."