Wound up in Salina Kansas

Excuse me but do you have tornado shelters?  Who knew?  May starts tornado season and its a smart idea to keep track of the alerts - not something easy to do if you have the Audible books blaring away.  This hotel has a shelter.  The restaurant had one.  And the rest stops today had shelters!

 Since I am the Casita Minister of Communications and Gadgets the tornado threat caused me to upgrade our apps.  'Storm' is a great app that uses the GPS to locate the car and overlays the weather radar sweep/color coded to let you know where the storms are and how dangerous they are - green/not bad; red/ALERT!  Between that and Trucker Path (shows all the truck stops with a list of full facilities (mechanics/medical/gas/etc) and good old Google Maps - we are 'truckin' along.   We've got a good system of keeping everything charged and plugged in when we need it - the Highlander now has 2 chargers and 3 USB ports.  Keeping track of the chords and plugs in the hotel rooms is another and much more difficult task!

We had an easy/lucky day today - no construction; we outdrove the storms and other then a hotel reservation glich it was a pretty uneventful day.  We made one bad exit in Kansas City (yesterday we goofed in St Louis - maybe the Casita is trying to take us to  more urban areas??) but Google Maps quickly gave us an adjustment and we did a 'round about' to get back to where we needed.

The Casita still takes up much of my thinking although I'm getting much more comfortable trailing it.  But we stop where I think we can get in/out.  We stay overnight where we can get in/out.  We are trying to average 50 mph - and sometimes we do - but its not an average yet.  I'm not competent enough to be spontaneous - for this trip the side trips aren't going to happen.  Thank goodness Aunt Kass loaded up the refrigerator and food - we grab a bite and keep on truckin!

The thunderstorms are booming now - we are cozy and nested into a place with good parking/pull through and a restaurant so we don't have to go out in the rain.  But its suppose to snow in Denver/Boulder tonight and we're trying to figure out how that might impact tomorrow's travel and our visit to Claudia in Boulder.  After an hour of watching Weather Channel 'drama' (does every burst of wind and drop of rain have apocalyptic potential???) I've decided we'll just wake up in the morning and decide.