It was a Dark & Stormy Night
Memphis TN

Said while hunched over a typewriter while sitting on top of a doghouse.

The best part of trips are the stories that come as a result of experiences.  Typically when you start out on a trip you hope for the greatest, most-enjoyable happenings, but those don’t make for the riveting tales when calling home. That being said I am glad to say I have no such riveting tales from my Arkansas/Tennessee/Mississippi jaunt but it does come with a story here or there.

My flight left at 7, naturally meaning to easily go through customs I had to arrive at the airport two hours early. I live a 30 minute drive from the airport but seeing as Calgary is now in the season of Road Construction this may be extended to one hour dependent on the potholes being filled or lines being painted. So, crunch the numbers and that leads to a home departure time of 4am. Naturally I also procrastinated on packing. So this meant roughly one hour of sleep.

Good news is I can fall asleep just about anywhere. I’m sure there have been instances of me half resting while standing leaning against a wall. Twice I have slept through fire alarms. So no problem. Probably slept the entirety of the flight to Chicago and simply enjoyed the view on the puddle jumper to Little Rock, Arkansas.

Upon arriving on Little Rock I turned on my phone and was bombarded with messages.  I’m convinced my mother was informing the local weathermen that there was severe rain with a chance of tornadoes because it took a good ten minutes being off the plane for me to even see a screen describing the weather.  I picked up my bags, got my car, and hit the road.  My original plan was to immediately leave the interstate and take a side road through some curiously named towns (wandering homebody that I am). These plans almost immediately turned to ‘run for the hills!” The sky was green, and swirling, the radio was blaring warnings, and there were threats of giant hail (at this point I was going”I’m an idiot. I should have put on the extra insurance.” Is it bad to admit I was more nervous about hail than I was a tornado?).  So I drove, full bore ahead to Memphis (half laughing every time a ‘Tornada’ Warning was made). The radio announced the counties that were being placed under watches, I rather multitaskingly looked up all the counties on my phone. The bulk of the storm was between 20-40 minutes behind me almost the entire trip. It wasn’t quite the sunny meandering side trip I had planned in which I would announce my arrival at the destination city by blaring Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn and kill several rolls of film along the way. Nope. I hit the road and ran like a Formula One driver in my road hugging Corolla.

As for where I was staying. The Rodeway Inn. Not entirely certain how that came about – believe it was a recommendation of a friend’s recommendation to the people attending FIND. Let me start by saying – sketchy. So sketchy. So of course so awesome. As noted, I can sleep absolutely anywhere. In Guatemala bed was a half inch thick mat on top of plywood on top of about three feet of firewood. I slept like a not-appropriately-termed baby.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first few hours in Memphis – simply wandered a bit, planned out the rest of my day. This included determining every sandwich shop in Memphis was closed on Mondays and I would have to settle for a sub-sauce-less Subway sandwich and catching up on emails but it worked. I was entirely content.

Then the rain started. It wasn’t really rain as much as it was a constant onslaught of a body of water the size of the Hudson Bay systemically being picked up (terminology, right, evaporated) and dropped right over the Rodeway Inn. I witnessed the most delightful light show (ie. thunderstorm) of all time and made myself cozy for the rest of the evening. This is except for the few times I poked my head out to remark to myself how grand of a view I had – as the Mini Mississippi was now carving a path down Linden Avenue. What I shouldn’t have done was looked up the image below. Taste the weather service rainbow people!

I survived. I have a decent enough story. I had a grand time. More to come :)