Flatter than Kansas!

Morning broke gray and humid, and when we flipped on the TV the Weather Channel was showing a huge thunderstorm complex bearing down on Kansas City, 100 miles to our rear. The route to Nashville runs through one of the worst parts of Tornado Alley so we flew out the door, hoping to outrun the storm. The first couple of hours were pretty unmemorable, but then we got to St. Louis, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Gi got a couple of nice shots of the Gateway Arch, the iconic symbol of the city designed by Eero Saarinen.

Crossing the Mississippi River, into southern Illinois I realized that the farmland between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers was actually much flatter than the Kansas landscape Gi had commented on earlier in the trip. I guess you don't hear people comment on this very much because dense woods typically border the roads in this area and you only see the flat bottomlands through occasional gaps or when the road goes up and over a bridge or overpass. The lushness of the woods is not surprising given the heat, humidity and abundant water. What did surprise me, though, was the abundance and diversity of wildflowers. Rudbeckias, Queen Anne's lace, morning glory, butterfly weed (Asclepius), trumpet vine, false aster and pink phlox were all in bloom, and most were there naturally. The purple coneflowers and penstemmon blooming along the roadsides in the Dakotas were beautiful, but the flowers here were amazing. (Sorry that there were no photos to do them justice, but shooting objects only 20 feet away while traveling 80 mph yields nothing but blurs.)

The floral diversity in this area also extended to the woods lining the road with oaks, hickories, elms, maples, sycamores, tupelos, catalapas crowding the roadside. The seed pods on these catalapas were already quite long, and reminded me of a catalapa Gi and I saw in the park in Kamloops. (I was surprised to know they could survive that far norht.) In places, pines and redcedar had pioneered the bare soils left in road cuts, but they are rapidly being crowded to an early death by shade from the broadleaf trees.

This area is also a hotspot for tornadoes and damaging winds. In numerous places along the roadside the trees were mangled and snapped. There were freshly downed trees as well as trees that had been blown over months or years before. A lot of the tall tree that were still standing had a funny morphology that obviously resulted from the small upper limbs being ripped from the tree tops, after which short twigs and dense foliage sprouted directly from primary branches and trunks. The results were trees that look like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

We finally crossed the Ohio River into Paducah, KY and, as usual, barge traffic was thick on the river. We got doused by rain in Paducah, and for only the second time ever stopped to take shelter for a few minutes under an interstate overpass. After stowing the camera we made another start, but had to pull over again to take shelter in a Waffle House. One burger and couple of cups of coffee later we were on our way to Nashville, and our timing couldn't have worked out better. We arrived at the hotel about 15 minutes behind a huge thunderstorm, then, about two hours after we checked in, the storm from Kansas City blew in behind us with lots of lightning and some vicious wind. Hopefully, these storms will cool things off ahead of us, and make the final 6 hour ride home tomorrow pleasant and uneventful.