Ruth and I are making a road trip out of our return to Florida. We drove to Branson, Missouri last Monday. We’ve never been, so we decided to take a look. Our planned route took us through Indianapolis, St. Louis and, ultimately, Branson. The drive was eventful.
Ruth sought directions on her phone for the first leg of the trip. She was driving as we approached Indianapolis. As we listened to Siri, I knew the directions she was spouting off were wrong. I grabbed my phone and asked for directions to St. Louis. I didn’t have the phone on “speak and talk mode”, but I could see my directions were in conflict with Ruth’s. I told her to follow my directions and grabbed the road atlas we carry for confirmation. I was right. The lying Siri was wrong.
Siri was barking out directives, and I couldn’t shut her up. I told Ruth to listen to me, which is sometimes difficult for her. In the end, she did as I asked. At one point I sat on Ruth’s phone in an attempt to shut Siri up. Ruth has accused me of talking out of my butt in the past. This time it was true. We still heard Siri’s muffled voice telling us to “hee” while I said, “haw”. It was total confusion. I knew we had to get on I-70, but Siri kept insisting otherwise.
We struggled like this for about fifteen, stressful minutes. Each mile marker flew bye. I’d been conflicted in Indianapolis before, so I focused on getting us on the correct path, while Siri focused on her’s. The final decision was the last straw. Siri told us to go right, while my directions said left. We went left. After things settled down, we discovered Ruth’s phone was trying to take us to downtown Indianapolis. That was never our goal.
It rained during part of the trip. At one point Ruth’s phone rang out a warning. At first I thought it was an “amber alert”. If we’d have been in Florida I would have thought “silver alert”. It was neither. It was a tornado warning. “Seek cover now! If you are in a building, head to the basement! If you are in a vehicle, get off the road and head to the nearest building! Seek cover immediately!” My first thought was “Holy crap!”
We were in Missouri about and hour and a half outside of St. Louis. Luckily there was a rest area about two miles up the road. We pulled in and stopped. About two dozen cars joined us. We headed into the bathrooms as I knew they were the safest places to be. When I was in the school business, we packed as many students as possible in the bathrooms and locker rooms during tornado drills. Most have no windows and the plumbing helps reinforce the structure.
The winds howled, and the rain blew sideways, but we never saw a tornado. After the danger passed, we headed off again.
About two hours outside Branson, we saw a sign for Uranus, Missouri. We thought the name was amusing. We were eighty-one miles outside of town when we saw the first billboards for the Uranus Fudge Shop. Their billboards boasted two major slogans. “There’s BIG Fun in Uranus!” and “The best fudge is found in Uranus!” You can’t make fudge like this up.
TBC