Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
St. Louis, Missouri
Columbus, Missouri
Kansas City, Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
Russell, Kansas
Random rest stop – location unknown, Kansas
The trip began long before this day; preparing, packing, emailing, video chatting across the country, pulling out the contacts books. It was a hard trip to pack for because although we knew our schedule was bound to be changing on the fly, we knew for sure we’d be covering a lot of climates, terrain, and adventures. From shorts and flip-flops to parkas and ski hats we had to think of it all. Beyond that, although we had contacts to crash with in a lot of destinations, we were anticipating camping in at least a few spots and definitely in Alaska for some sidebar trips. Oh yeah, did I mention that all three of us were cramming into a 2006 VW Jetta for the adventure?
So at 4:00A.M. the morning of Friday, May 23rd, and also a mere 12 hours after graduating from Temple University, one of my longtime best friends, Dan, and I were up and making our final packing preparations. We hiked our packs up to the train station at Philadelphia City hall and the trip officially began. We had a 7:25A.M. flight to meet Lisl, our third companion.
Lisl had just graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and had studied abroad in Copenhagen with Dan last fall. She had told Dan she was looking to do a road trip back to her home in Anchorage, Alaska after graduating and needed a few car-mates. Dan recruited me and the journey was born. We arrived in St. Louis around 9:00A.M, local time, and met her. The Jetta was filled with Lisl’s college supplies and after adding our packs and gear we were to the brim. But hey…we’re young; we’re flexible, right?
Lisl showed us the infamous St. Louis Arch, a.k.a. “The Gateway to The West”. Naturally, in about as cliché of a fashion as possible,
we officially started the journey here, spending way to long taking corny photos walking through the arch, and therefore “into the west”. Yeah, you can make fun of us for that…we’re still making fun of ourselves.We hit the road early with ambitious plans to push completely through Kansas (nothing personal to anyone from Kansas) and arrive into Denver, Colorado late that night. We started strong and drove through a lot of places and towns. We took a slight detour to visit Blake, a friend of Dan and Lisl’s from study abroad, in Lawrence, Kansas, home of Kansas University of which he was a student. He gave us a nice tour of Main Street and told us about the city. It was a pleasant surprise and had a really good vibe. We dined on a feast of homemade ice-cream (dinner…sorry mom) and hit the road again. We were on the road and around 8:30P.M. stopped for a routine gas refill. As things often are on great adventures, it turned out to be everything but routine.
Upon walking into the gas station in Russell, Kansas, we saw probably around 10 people crowded around the cashier’s desk. Now I wouldn’t expect there to be too many hot spots or things going on around 8:30P.M. in central Kansas, but this seemed a little suspicious. I slid behind the crowd and peaked into the center of attention, which happened to be a laptop showing the Weather Channel radar for the town. Now one of the last things I heard from multiple family members right before leaving, besides “Don’t get eaten by a bear” was to “Watch out for the tornados”. But honestly, who heeds a warning as such seriously. Not many people, at least from the east coast, ever truly envision themselves getting caught in a tornado. This seemed to be the theme of the social event at the Fossil Station convenience store on this evening though.
Masked with relatively calm faces and demeanor, it must have been obvious we weren’t locals. Almost immediately we started getting questions – Where did you come from? Where are you going? What did you see? Outside of the new Radiohead album we’d been listening to and the dark night sky we didn’t have too many answers for them. We came to find out that Kansas was littered with what the TV later referred to as “Super Severe Weather”. The very next town down Route 70, about 30 minutes down the road, had just been bulldozed by a serious tornado. Had we not stopped for gas in Russell we would have driven right into it. This storm was going northeast though and then behind it was one covering the entire height of the state and dropping baseball sized hail.
Still relatively calm in such a surreal situation, the three of us stood in the gas station with the locals of nearby towns seeking refuge and tried to decide how to proceed. At this point, a frantic woman came into the gas station and announced to everyone the following, “I just drove through two tornados. I swerved around three overturned semis. I barely made it out. Do you sell alcohol here?” This was perhaps our first warning to the severity of what laid ahead. At this point we did what any warm-blooded college student would do – bought a couple beers and decided to wait for some weather updates.
After sitting in the parking lot for about two hours discussing the half-humorous situation of where we were and what we’d narrowly avoided, it began to rain and we got in the car. At this point we were introduced to Cliff. Cliff was a radio broadcaster. Cliff chased storms. If the movie Twister hasn’t entered your head at any point thus far, it should now, because this is exactly what Cliff did. Providing comfort to many and sheer information to others, Cliff chased these tornado’s in a van and provided constant vocal communication over the radio. He became our best friend.
Cliff was about 45 minutes south of Russell, where we’d been stranded for about 3 hours at this point, and it didn’t sound like the tornado’s were any longer in our area. We were pretty confident and antsy at this point so decided to make the jump and keep pushing west to Colorado. We were back on Route 70 for about half an hour, watching the lightening in the distance behind us when the true disaster of what we’d narrowly missed became apparent. We passed the three overturned semis the woman saw plus two more. You could smell the gasoline like she said. Although there didn’t appear to be any major injuries in any of them, it was a pretty awakening sight, seeing a fraction of the things locals deal with regularly. As if things hadn’t been insane enough to this point, the most unexpected of things came to cap off the day.
We saw the police lights from a distance and slowed as we approached. We could see a car about 10 feet off the side of the road, but a policeman flagging us onward. Phew, I guess everything was ok…time to just keep going. Then we saw it. A cow in the middle of the road. A huge cow. A dead cow. It was lying there stiff, with what was later realized to be…well, you can envision the picture. Yes, Twister was in full effect by this point. Low and behold, 10 minutes further down the road…more police, more smashed cars, and three more dead cows. The only thing we could imagine was the tornado had torn down a fence and the poor cows had wandered up to the highway. At this point it was 1:00A.M. and we opted that Denver would be better untouched for the night and we chose the Jetta as our sleeping quarters for a few hours.
This was the first day. It was 22 hours of absolute madness, randomness, and good-times. It set the bar for the rest of the trip pretty high.
A video of an overturned semi we passed after the tornadoes went through.
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