By Rich Miller
First off, I want to send out my thoughts and prayers to all the fine folks that were affected by the tornados that swept across the South. Not only was it the tornadoes but the floods, also that I found out about way too late. I was in Alabama the day after the tornadoes came through and saw first-hand the damage that they caused. I was in Katrina and several other bad hurricanes in Florida, but I have never seen anything like what those tornadoes did in Alabama.
After leaving Alabama, I was headed to Kansas to turkey hunt a couple of days and do as much fishing as I possibly could. I had to be in Birmingham on Friday and didn’t get to leave there until Friday afternoon. The route we were taking was different from what we usually go and that’s when I got to see all of the tornado damage.
When I left Birmingham, my GPS said that I would arrive at Mick’s in Kansas at 2:10 a.m. But when we hit Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, all of that changed. The road that was going to take us to Springfield, Missouri, was closed due to flooding. I got on the GPS and the map and found another route that would take me around the flooded road. After a twenty-minute detour, we thought we had made it and hit another roadblock due to the floods.
At this time, we were in north Arkansas close to the Missouri line. In talking with the crew that was at the roadblock, we found out the route we were going to have to take to get around the roadblock and that broke out hearts. We had to go back south and around the flooded area and it ended up about five hours out of the way.
After all the detours and a nap along the way we ended up in Mick’s driveway at 9:25 a.m. on Saturday morning. We had planned on being in the woods that morning but when we got there the wind was blowing about 30 mph. And at that point we decided to go fishing. The only good news after our trip in was we made it safely and we caught a limit of crappie that made for a super meal that afternoon.