Thunder and Tornadoes in Oklahoma

We left Texas on Monday morning and headed north to Oklahoma City. The drive is a little over six hours, and we got into town in late afternoon. We decided to head straight downtown, and our first stop was the Oklahoma City bombing memorial. They really did such a wonderful job with this - it's beautiful and unique, and it really captures and honors the tragedy and every life lost. There are two towering entrances to the memorial - one at each end. One says 9:01, the other 9:03. The bombing happened at 9:02am on April 19, 1995, so the memorial is in effect encompassed in that minute.

In a few of the photos below, you can see rows of chairs. Each chair represents a life that was lost (big chairs for adults, little chairs for children; 168 total). The giant tree pictured is the "survivor tree" because it withstood the attack while buildings and trees around it were destroyed. A full explanation of the components of the memorial can be found here.

After the memorial, we headed to a section of city called Bricktown, right by the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball arena. It just so happens that there was an NBA playoff game that night in town, so the streets were alive with Thunder and Maverick fans alike. Our moods very quickly changed from somber and reflective to energized and competitive (competitive because I wanted OKC to win, and Tom wanted Dallas to win). Bricktown is a newish development of restaurants and bars along a (manmade?) river that's also within walking distance of the basketball arena and a minor league baseball stadium.

We walked around for a bit and then decided to have dinner and watch the first half at Bricktown Brewery. They have a bunch of local brews, so we got a "sampler" that gave a little taste of five different local beers. As we were watching the game, we noticed that cameras kept showing giant crowds outside the arena, so we walked over at halftime to see it in person. We were glad we made the switch - and now we knew why the bars and restaurants had emptied out. Everyone was at the arena! We stayed until almost the end, but since it looked like the Thunder was going to win and there was lightening and the threat of thunderstorms, we headed to our hotel early. Turns out Dallas came back and won in overtime...

The view outside the arena: free live entertainment and big-screen views of the game!

Tuesday morning we decided to take it easy and run some errands. We planned to leave Oklahoma City after we ate lunch, but we learned that the area was under a tornado watch all afternoon. Locals were leaving work and calling family members, schools were closing, and it appeared that this was a more major watch than others... as we were processing all of this and trying to figure out what to do, weather forecasters announced that an F5 tornado had developed and touched down in exactly the direction we would've been traveling had we headed on to our next destination... not knowing what else to do, we headed southeast because the storm cells that were spawning tornadoes were coming from the southwest and heading northeast... unfortunately, the storms ran from as far south as Dallas to north of OKC. There was no way to outrun it and no way to know when another tornado would develop.

A second F4 tornado developed in the same path behind the behemoth twister, and a third F3 developed south of those. We got stuck in-between the two paths, but luckily as we were driving on the congested highways and getting more and more terrified by the weather forecasters' descriptions and warnings, we decided to pull off the road in Moore (south of OKC) and ride out the storms in a big movie theater. This is the areas largest theater, and lots of cars were in the parking lot, so we figured that not only would this be a sturdy place to take cover, there would be people used to this kind of thing inside, and the theater workers would probably be organized. We talked to a police officer outside who said it was a good place to take cover, so we headed in. Everyone had to sit along the walls of an interior hallway, and at one point they had to turn the power off. While we weren't in the direct path of any of the tornadoes, we got quite a bit of rain, wind, and hail, and we spent nearly three hours taking cover. Some of the locals said they hadn't had tornadoes this bad in nearly 12 years. Of course we were in town the day they hit. Fun fact: tornadoes hit Oklahoma City more than any other city in the U.S.

Pictures below: two from inside the theater as we waited for the tornadoes to pass, one from outside the theater after the fact, one from our iPhone weather app before we lost service, an AP photo of the F5 as it approached I-40.

Once everything was over and we realized we (and our car) were fine, it was actually kind of cool to have had this authentic Oklahoma experience... we came outside to a sunny sky (!) and headed to our hotel exhausted. (I have to include a little disclaimer: I was far more terrified than Tom... he was only slightly uneasy.) :-) WHAT. A. DAY.

Wednesday morning, we got the heck out of tornado central and headed west! Up next: a day traveling Route 66.