Day 8 Hot Springs Ar to Oklahoma City Ok. 350 Miles
Last night I was having problems uploading photos to Blogger, so I didn't get to bed until 11:30. It had been raining all evening, the news said there were plenty of storms around but nothing to worry about. Well....tell that to my dogs!
I was almost asleep when I heard the first rumble of distant thunder. I tried with every cell in my body to wish it away because I KNOW that the dogs turn into quivering, panting, pacing and generally insane animals during a nighttime severe thunderstorm. Thankfully, they are a small breed, shih tzus.
The dogs sleep in the living room section of the RV in three little doggie beds. We sleep in the back in a queen bed (we're used to a king) that almost completely fills up the 'bedroom' with about 1 foot on one side and half that on the other. There is a door that we close between the two rooms.
With every flash and clap of thunder I could hear a single scratch at the door and a little tiny whine. The rain, which had been steady but not extremely heavy, started coming down in torrents. Rain on the RV roof is extremely loud....it sounds like being inside of a giant popcorn popper. As if that wasn't loud enough, there suddenly came a booming, ground shaking clap of thunder.
That did it. All three dogs must have joined forces and pushed on the door until it gave way. They came charging and tumbling over each other trying to get on the bed. We relented. There was no way that they were going to calm down without us comforting them. I foolishly thought this behavior would have stopped after the kids left home.
So there we all were, all FIVE of us, in the bed. The lightning was almost constant, like a strobe light, rain so heavy we had to shout to each other to be heard and of course, the crashing of thunder claps. One dog decided that the only way she can relax is to 'dig a den' to hide in, so she started digging madly on the bed, the other paces to relax and he began to pace up and down the bed, preferable walking on our bodies. The third one just gets catatonic when stressed so she was laying between us seemingly in full rigor mortis.
You can only imagine how conducive this was for sleeping.
Suddenly the rain started to let up a little, until...I heard *Ping* and another, *ping* followed by a thousand *pings* HAIL! The *pings* turned to *pongs* as the hail grew larger. This wasn't helping the dogs mental state (or ours) at all!
I asked Jim to turn the TV on...he did and saw the live news warning about a tornado. This was getting scary, especially since we didn't know what county we were in AND we were in a 30 foot aluminum box, under a huge tree, that isn't attached to the ground in any way.
He turned to me and said, "We need to put our pants on." Always prepared, that's my husband. So, we put our pants on. The storms moved on around 1:30 am, I finally fell asleep at 2:00am. Off and on during the night I heard more storms, but NOT like the earlier ones. The dogs were banished back to their beds. At six o'clock the storms were close again so we just got up and got ready to drive to Oklahoma City.
We checked the weather before we left because we were going to be driving 80 miles on two lane, hilly and curvy roads on Rt7 to hook up with I40 in Russellville AR, then on to Oklahoma City. The ride was nice and uneventful...which is good! We were both too tired from last night to handle any excitement today. We are at a campground on the west side of the city.
Tomorrow we will tour OK City.
