Heat + humidity = tornados

I want to do a big day today to try catch up with the other guys. I got on the road by 6 partly due to trying to make miles but partly because the store in town I was planning on buying breakfast from doesn't open for another hour and a half. Time to find out if I can bike 20 miles on a granola bar(not a problem).

The scenery today was better than yesterday. I don't know how they do it but the rivers here are some of the clearest I've ever seen. They are on par with the glacier melt rivers. One river even had a blueish tint to it. I rode past the Ozark trail. Missouri's long distance hiking trail. It's defiantly being added to my list but the timing will require some research. If the humidity is like today with summer time heat I'd defiantly die trying to hike that.

Thanks to the oppressive humidity and a bit of heat I was moving slowly. I made it to the town of Summerville right before 1pm. That gave me just enough time to goto the local library and get the Wi-Fi password so I could check the weather. My 4g data has been amazing but since I entered the Ozarks I've only had 1g. Thanks to that I've not been able to keep up on the weather. Today was supposed to have bad thunderstorms but not until 3pm. So I wanted to get a feel for the storms and see if I could make the 22 miles to the next town.

I wouldn't have made it. Maybe if I was fresh and had ridden straight there I might have. But after the library stop and a refill at the local gas station there was no way. I debated back and forth over staying vs going before getting an update from my dad saying the storm which looked like it was going north of me expanded and was heading straight for me.

I managed to get a single bedroom cabin from the local youth center right as it started. Boy did it ever start. There were 70+ mph winds, lightning everywhere, and buckets of rain. Unlike the previous storms on this trip it just kept coming. 3 times the storms came through crazier than the previous. The one at 1130 pm had a thunder so loud it shook my cabin enough to wake me up. Good times. I spent most of the night sitting on the porch or just inside watching the mayhem. No tornados where I was but there was one just 20 miles north of the town I was heading for.