Days 41-42 Short Mountain Cove COE Oklahoma and WILDFIRES AND TORNADOES!!!

These posts are from the last two weeks of our vacation. We are now home, but I am continuing our day by day vacation posts to catch up --- after I dropped the ball. Sorry!

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Wednesday March 13th 

Sadly we left Carter Cove COE Park near Plainfield, Arkansas 2 days early. Due to the controlled burns in the National Forest throughout that whole section of the state, we had to drive quite a ways to get beyond the smoke.

I was not breathing well, and had to have on the air conditioning with closed dash air circulation was about the only way to circumvent the situation. 

We headed in a northwesterly direction, and soon we were crossing the border into Oklahoma by 11:00 a.m.

The song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma" kept playing through my head. A couple of times I burst out into the full chorus for a musical tribute. Steve was not amused. I love their welcome sign, it looks like a quilt block!

We zoomed on through the Ozarks and really didn't get to stop to see a lot. We will have to come back again another year and explore the Ozarks. We kept fighting the haze of campfire smoke just off to the south of us. We decided to just keep on going and get as far as we could go beyond where the controlled burns were taking place. We did find a map from the National Forest Service that showed all of their locations.

Wowzers! Did the scenery ever change! We had originally been in the swamplands of Southeast Arkansas and then worked our way up into the Ozarks as we headed north and west. Now we were hitting some of the rolling farmland of Oklahoma. It was absolutely beautiful! Everything is so green, and the blue sky just makes the greens even richer.

These photos are just snapped as we are rolling on by down the highway. Normally we don't even drive on interstates, but we decided this time we would so we could get to where we needed to go. 

We had chosen another Corps of Engineers Park that really wasn't too far off are beaten path. This one is called Short Mountain Cove. The campground basically has two big loops. We took the first one to the left and really didn't see any sites that we wanted to be on. It was getting cold and windy. So we looped on back and took the other road way around to get to the other loop of sites. This was much, much better!

We ended up on site 17,  which is $22, but only $11 with the Federal America the Beautiful Senior Access Pass. Breezy cannot describe the winds that were coming across the lake. But we didn't mind because it was a beautiful site. We planned to go for a little bike ride around the park and see what we could see.

This site was right up against the edge of the water which was really a great location. We walked along the shoreline a little bit with the dogs. It really is a wide part of the river that has been damned up. It feels like a lake though, and even had little tiny seashells along the edges, wedged in the sand.  

We rode around the park to check things out. Definitely the second loop is the much nicer area compared to the first loop. We didn't go into the bathrooms or the shower house side, but it looks the same as the other Corps of Engineer parks that we have been to. They are usually very nice and well maintained. 

After our bike ride, we hauled out our lawn chairs and sat on the leeward side of the motorhome to stay out of the wind. The sunshine felt good but the temps were dropping. While we sat there, we had the dogs on leashes hooked to our chairs with little carbineer clips. This has worked very well for us and we don't have to be holding a leash all the while. 

Nick, who if you know from my previous posts, has a neurotic aversion to ever being tied up with any nylon webbed leash. If you recall, he had been trapped in the woods while he was on the run for probably five or six days with a leash caught up in trees or rocks. He was starving to death and after five or six days he finally chewed himself free. I say he's channeling his inner Scarlett O'Hara when he says to us "As God as my witness, I will never be held back by a nylon woven web leash again!"

So we keep him on a chain leash. Easy. 

But ... we had Binney on a woven web leash--- She is never a problem and she has barely any teeth left to chew anything, much less a leash. 

In the matter of just a few minutes, while we sat there admiring the lake shore, I happened to look down and noticed something:

Yup!!!! That little stinker Nicholas had chewed right through Binney's leash and set her free.  Of course, she didn't go anywhere. But he did it. Just look at that face? How can you be mad at a face like that? 

Speaking of dogs, especially our spoiled rotten ones, a few blogs back I posted about some cute little paw print fleece blankets that we found at Walmart. They were only $3 each. We have these perfect sized baby mattresses from baby diaper changing tables as beds for the dogs. They fit on each side of our bed snugly and each one has their own bed and their own blanket.

They can be removed for washing, and now the dogs do not have to lay on the plastic covered surface of the memory foam mattress pads.

I did get kind of tired of untangling and refolding the blankets each morning while picking them up. Sometimes the dogs would drag the blankets around the camper. They were a tripping hazard for us.  I decided to take the blankets and do a little sewing project...

I cut the correct size around the mattress and made a casing sleeve to run a band of elastic through. Basically they are now a fitted sheet with boxed-end corners to fit the mattresses.

Now they are nice and neat, comfy and padded, and we won't trip over the wadded up blankets as we try to get around the bed the middle of the night!

It meets their approval.

As the evening wore on, the weather started getting rougher.  We tuned into the local TV stations and checked their weather forecasts. We enabled the warning signals on our phones because there were tornadoes and hail and sleet and horrible high winds headed in our direction! We only had a few big trees around us, but it is still scary to be in a camper near any trees at all. We seriously contemplated moving to a wide open site somewhere.  The winds seem to die down around 10:00 p.m. so we stayed put. 

About 4:00 a.m. I woke up to the increased wind sounds again outside. I turned on the TV and I checked also the weather apps on our phone. There is a huge band of thunderstorms moving across Oklahoma heading in our direction!! 

We were located right between that band of orange storms and Fort Smith. Our goal was to get up where the blue dot was of Enid, Oklahoma later that day. If we waited at the campground till 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. to take off, we would be going right through the middle of this horrendous storm!!!!

At 4:15 a.m. I could no longer sleep. The winds were increasing and the camper was rocking. I woke Steve up and showed him the warnings. We decided to pull in the slides and perk a pot of coffee. The storms were increasing and if we continued going directly west, we would be in the thick of things. 

Sooooooo at 4:30 a.m. We took off in the dark and headed north and west and did a leapfrog motion to get past the worst of the first band of storms. (We HATE driving in the dark). 

The first red arrow to the right was the first horrendous band that went through. We were able to get right around it before it reached the area where we had just had been in the night before!

Watching the local weather reports, they showed the hail that fell was 5 and 1/2 inches across! Yes, bigger than a baseball, the size of a softball! If we had stayed put, that would have been on top of us!! 

The winds were so damaging that there were power outages everywhere and trees down blocking roads. We were very, very fortunate to make that first leapfrog and land just west of Tulsa.

Now a second band was coming and it looked to be even worse than the first! This is where we literally got on the interstates and drove faster than we normally ever do... We usually stay in the 60 to 65 mph range and take our time. But not this time. It was time to make some tracks!!! 

We got up around the top end of Oklahoma City and worked our way over to Enid, Oklahoma. As we drove along there was the whole edge of the front that we could see on our left side as we drove north and west. 

It was so strange, we could also see the jet trail marks from all of the airlines, also avoiding the storms and running on an angle to the north. 

They were doing the same thing we were doing! 

I am pleased to say that we made it by the skin of our teeth just past the edge of the second storm. We had two different weather apps going as well as a local radio station to track what the storms were doing, and we were very fortunate to avoid any damage. Some white knuckles on the steering wheel, but otherwise, we were safe and sound and beyond the scope of either of those two storms. 

Whew!!!!

112 miles travel today 

1,466 miles so far