Holiday 2019 part 2

Heavy Weather

After the graduation, the weather continued to be less than optimal for outdoors activities, so we hunkered down and watched the rain.

We did have some sunny days, but the temperatures were lower than normal, which was useful for us Brits, because we were able to walk over to the local stores on dry days, but the weather did not stay dry for long

Whenever it rains in Kansas, you usually get thunder and lightning and this year was no exception.  We went to bed to the sound of thunder going around us and woke in the morning to the same sounds.  The rain continued to fall on and off and now and again flood warnings were given out for various parts of the area.

 When over in the States, although my phone will connect via AT & T, it costs a lot per day if I use it, so I use a locally bought phone when over there.  This year we were planning a trip to a much larger city than Lawrence whilst we were in the USA, so TBH and I decided that we would be well advised to use two local low cost phones, one for each of us in case we got separated.  So I upgraded to a newer model giving TBH my old AT & T phone and bought a new SIM for it that gave 90 days of local phone calls.  Something we have found essential in the past, because if, or more likely when, our flight times are changed by the airline, we would need to contact them from inside the airport to organise a new connection.  This could take several long phone calls and if the phone ran out of minutes just before that date, we would have difficulty doing this.

My Trcfone LG on the left and the older AT & T on the right

Having two phones also  meant that we could keep in touch when out and about without having to rely on one of the family.  My new phone was nothing fancy, but it was a more recent model than the one we had bought about four years before when over there.

During one particularly heavy storm, around six PM, I was out on the porch watching the lightning and hoping to get a photo of a lightning flash when my phone started to make a rather nerve jangling sound.  I took it out to look at it and it had a large message on the screen telling me a tornado was heading my way and I should seek my safe place immediately!
No sooner than I had digested this, when TBH burst out of the front door telling me we had to get down into the basement right now!
The house's alarm had gone off and the TV was giving out a warning for Douglas County.

This is the kind of thing that residents of Tornado Alley tend to own and there is one similar to this in TS and TDIL's bedroom, which gives out alarms and pre-recorded messages.

This bombardment of alarms and warnings is standard practice for the area, sending out warnings to your cell phone, TV and radio, but this was a first for us and the first time in The Grandson's (TG's) too. For The Daughter In Law (TDIL) this was the second time a tornado been predicted to be approaching their house in eighteen years or so and so it was a bit unusual.  We gathered everything valuable and portable that we did not want to have to go into the next county to recover and then set about getting the cats to safety.  They have three cats, two boys and a kind of rescue female,  but none of them wanted to cooperate and so for a while three adults and a teenager ran around the house trying to corral three cats.

Tom

Gerry

Sasha

When they say something is as difficult as herding cats, there never was a truer saying.  The storm was approaching fast and we really did not want to spend  too much time persuading reluctant cats that they really needed to come down with us.   After a short struggle, we had two of them in a safe place, but Gerry had decided he was not going allow himself to be captured if it was the last thing he did.  Since that may well have been the case if he was not captured, TG in particular, who is very fond of his cats, was getting more and more desperate to get him under lock and key. Between us we finally managed to catch him, but only by stationing ourselves in every doorway until he was finally caught and bundled into the basement.
Whilst we were all rather alarmed at the prospect of the house being destroyed, TG was even more so because he realised that if the tornado struck the house, one of the major casualties would be his rather extensive comic book collection.  In the end we persuaded him to leave them to the fates, on the grounds that we would rather he was safe, because unlike himself, comics could be replaced.  He reluctantly agreed and stopped trying to gather as many as he could carry and we all stayed down in the basement.

The basement of the family’s home is not a dank bare walled room, but a normal floor of their house, consisting of three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and just one bare room where the furnace is. When we stay there, we sleep in one of the basement bedrooms.  The other two are set up as studies, one of which was now acting as a cat shelter for the female cat, Sasha, whilst the other two, Tom and Gerry, were in the bathroom.

In the basement living room there is a TV, with at least a 70 inch screen, where we could watch the progress of the storm courtesy of the weather network which takes over all the local channels during this kind of emergency situation. This showed us the radar map and the predictions of where the storm was heading. It was heading straight towards us!

It is amazing how interesting a weather report can become when it contains a tornado prediction with you in its path.

It got progressively darker until the small basement windows showed nothing but night black sky and the tension increased a notch when the local sirens went off outside.  This is the last of the warnings and it means the tornado is imminent.  It was a bit like living through WWII all over again and expecting an air raid. Not that I recall that very well other than a sense of dread whenever I hear sirens coupled with  the stories my parents told, describing what happened.

During our nail biting wait, fortunately for us, the tornado slowly veered south of us and went through a less well populated area. You cannot imagine the relief we felt, but we still needed to keep hunkered down because under those conditions a new tornado can form at any time, so we stayed in the basement until the all clear was announced locally and we could return to normal life.

One worrying aspect of this was that TS was at work, over towards Kansas City and was due to come home from work at around the time of the tornado and his route home took him right through its path.  TS was well aware of the storm and its path, having seen the warning from his own phone and no doubt from the local warning service and so waited for the all clear before starting for home.
It must have been rather worrying for him too, because he would have seen the weather maps and understood where the tornado was headed, but TDIL had been able to keep him up to date on what was happening back at the ranch.  Once the tornado had passed he set out for home and on his way saw a lot of the destruction, where trees and power lines had been ripped up.  Besides the power cables, the most impressive thing he recalled seeing was a totally mangled road sign which gave him an idea of the ferocity of the storm.   To everyone's relief, he soon arrived home safely and was interested to hear our experience of events, particularly the cat chase.

This picture was taken a few days later and they are brand new.  Showing how quickly the services respond to a disaster, but on the day TS came by, every one of these were broken.

The following morning we started to see the damage reports and it was pretty drastic.

We were half way between Lake Clinton and where it says Lawrence on this map. Bottom left.

Tornadoes can be very narrow at the base and so leave a thin trail of destruction with two houses in its path remaining undamaged whilst the one in between them was totally destroyed, but this one was almost a mile wide in places and probably contained more than one funnel cloud that had touched down inside the wall cloud that surrounded it.  A wall cloud is a distinct shaped, circular cloud which can obscure the actual supercell from view from both a visual and radar images of  the tornado.

This is a picture of the Lawrence tornado.  You can only see the wall cloud, not the actual funnel cloud that does all the damage.

 When we were there a few years before and another tornado was heading our way, I did a lot of research on the subject and did a short talk on the subject for my U3A science group when I got home, so I understand something of what is going on during these storms.
That particular year it petered out long before  before reaching our district, but it gave Oklahoma City a real pasting before dispersing and several people were killed.

Tornadoes are measured on the EF scale, a scale created by the meteorologist Ted Fugita, starting with EF zero at the bottom of the scale, with wind speeds around 65-85mph, up to EF 5 being over 200mph.  Anything above that, you really don’t care exactly how fast the wind is blowing and no one bothers to try to make accurate measurements, although it has been claimed that at one time, one was clocked at 300mph .

This is EF 2 damage

The Lawrence one was recorded as an EF4, which is anything from 166 - 200mph and some of the areas it had struck looked like pictures of the Somme at the end of WWI, with trees stripped bare, left with only broken branches, witness to the ferocity of the wind.
Fortunately the district the tornado passed through had wide open spaces between the houses so only a few homes were destroyed, but destroyed was an understatement for some. Whilst several houses had roofs and even the whole top floor removed, some were just a hole in the ground where the basement was left behind with the entire house in pieces that were scattered over a half mile.

This disaster site was a market garden with all the greenhouses destroyed and the owners home damaged beyond repair. 

This building was shifted off its foundations, leaving an open basement

Some of the damage to a building in Linwood.  EF 4 winds are dangerous!

 After all that excitement was over, the weather improved and it became warmer, although not as warm as normal for late May in Kansas and life returned to normal, until it was time for our trip . 

Holiday 2019

Next stop America

This year is it was our turn to go to the USA to visit The Better Half's (TBH’s) son and family. 

The flight over was calm and smooth and we arrived early. Then it got difficult. The last time we flew via O’Hare airport in Chicago, after the usual opening of all our hand luggage to show clear transparent soap bags containing no more than a few milliliters of liquid, working laptops, tablets, phones and such, removed our belts and shoes, keys and loose change and fought the other passengers for a tray to put them in, we strolled over to the row of machines and had our passport scanned, fingerprints and photographs taken by the machine and we were on USA soil.

This time after the above process of unpacking and standing around in no shoes holding up my trousers with one hand whilst sorting and recovering all my stuff with the other, we joined the end of a huge queue, or 'line' in the local language. This stretched out of sight around a corner. O’Hare is not a small airport, so the queue must have stretched almost a hundred yards to where we saw it turn a corner. After a slow shuffle, forwards a few paces at a time with long stationary pauses in between whilst we got to know our fellow sufferers close to us, we could see the line stretched on another hundred yards until it disappeared around another corner. After another endless shuffle forward, wait, shuffle forward and wait, eventually we could see around this corner. This was the place where all the check in machines were and we could see that people were moving through in a convoluted maze of barriers which ended with three immigration officers doing a final check of your paperwork. Since about four aircraft had just disembarked all their passengers at the same time as us, this had created a line of at least a quarter of a mile. We had two hours between connecting flights, which normally is plenty of time and often pretty boring, but by the time we were half way through the maze, our flight time had passed and we were resigned to the fact that we would miss our connection. So now thoroughly demoralised, we shuffled on stoically. Eventually we were through and on USA soil, only to discover that, just for the icing on the cake, so to speak, the train that runs around O’Hare to link the various terminal buildings was not running due to a $8 billion upgrade or something and we had to wait in another line get on a very overcrowded bus to get to terminal three. Two buses filled before we could squeeze on to one. 

O'Hare's non working train service

 Once we were aboard the bus, it left the airport and went out into the surrounding roads. Because of this, it had to contend with Chicago traffic to get around to the terminal where our aircraft was, as we supposed, just leaving. We had experienced Chicago traffic before and like London or most large cities, it is not forgiving and the drivers take no prisoners. The bus was a rental vehicle with a lunatic driver and no air conditioning, prompting some passengers to complain loudly, but the driver got us there, although it took a while. We eventually arrived angry and flustered by the uncomfortable bus ride and to our surprise and huge relief, the flight had been a delayed due to storms and had been held it up long enough to be able to get on board before it finally left. 

Thus was our first three hours of our visit to USA spent. 

 Arriving in Kansas City airport after another hour and a half’s flight, we were met by the family and were taken the final hour’s journey to their home where we could relax and unwind.

Graduation

One purpose of our visit, was to see The Grandson (TG) graduate from high school. This is a big deal in the USA, unlike my end of school experience which was more or less, “Good bye and don’t come back.” 

The weather was unseasonably cold and it rained a lot but on the evening of the Graduation ceremony, despite the predictions of rain, it remained dry. The ceremony had originally been planned to take place in an open air sports arena, but the uncertainty of the weather made the organisers decide to hold it inside in the Allen Fieldhouse indoor arena. 

This sports arena has an historic link with basket ball. Kansas University's very first basket ball team, the Jayhawks, had James Naismith as their coach. He was the man who actually invented the game and laid out the rules and standards for the game. 

 Unfortunately he was not a brilliant coach and the Jayhawks did not fare very well under his time as coach, losing most, if not every game. The current men and women’s teams have long since become much more successful and are now major league players. 

 We arrived in good time and made our way up the bleachers to some of the very few seats with a back and sat and waited.   Even with a back, they were not the most comfortable seat I have ever used, which suggests that baseball fans need to be pretty enthusiastic about their sport to spend hours every year perched on these uncomfortable seats in order to see their teams play.

All the diploma folders waiting to be handed out

The arena filled up slowly and various officials and tutors started to arrive.

Some of the officials

After a longish wait the students started to arrive in the entrance to the arena floor. They then filed into their position opposite the officials and tutors and a number of speeches were made in rapid, echoey American, which was largely incomprehensible to English ears. 

One of my soap-box preaching triggers are old fashioned PA systems. It has been possible to install systems that do not create confusing echoes for many decades, but that is rarely done, so we missed most of what was said. After all the speeches, the students formed a line and went to receive their diploma and become graduates.

The names being announced

Their names were read out one by one, which was a long process because there were a lot of students that year. Each student was given a folder, followed by a lot of formal hand shaking. We assumed the folders given out contained their diploma, but in fact everyone was given an empty folder in order to avoid having to have all the folders organised in the same order as the students. I realised after a while that the correct names were read out because each student handed a card with their name on it to the person calling out the names. As a result they had no need to know in advance who was next coming off the line. 

During the presentations, Pomp and Circumstance was being played continuously, just repeating the same refrain over and over and never playing the whole thing, which I found mildly annoying. Like any true Brit, I felt that song belonged to us Brits and not to some upstart colonials and should be played properly, but this seems to be the case all over the USA as it was always played in the same manner on any news story about graduation. Mind you, they certainly had more pomp and circumstance than I ever encountered at any place of education I ever attended as a student, apart from one place I worked at.  When I taught at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, which was also part of Cranfield University,  the graduate students there had a formal ceremony, ending with a flypast of the Red Arrows, which was a great way to graduate and great fun for us tutors and lecturers.

So the graduation was over and TGS was soon to be an undergraduate, headed for Kansas University.  The Logo of KU is the same as the Jayhawks and the team have a slogan that is chanted at matches or used as a recognition phrase when meeting fellow Jayhawks.

We made our way home just as the sun was setting and it still had not rained.

Hello 2019

New Year

It was New Year once more and January was cold, with the usual frost and clear days but more often than not, just damp and cold.

Jack Frost has been painting his patterns on my car

In February it snowed.

And snowed

And snowed,

 the deepest snow I have seen since for many years.

But signs of spring came and the snow went away.

Mistletoe

One of the odd things I have noticed about the Gloucestershire area is the predominance of mistletoe. This becomes clear during the winter months because mistletoe is an evergreen whilst the host tree is deciduous and so loses its leaves in winter.  You can then see all the mistletoe and in and around Gloucestershire many trees are infested with the parasite plant. Many more than I have ever seen in other English counties.

This is typical of the tree lined streets of Cheltenham, where the trees are festooned with clumps of mistletoe

Spring

In March, spring was well underway and we took a stroll along by the canal in Hungerford, a small town not to far from us.

The canal at Hungerford

You sometimes see episodes of BBC's  Bargain Hunt being filmed in the Hungerford Arcade.

This a wonderful place to browse since it is a host of nooks and crannies filled with all kinds of bric a brac, old books and genuine antiques.

In April, not much happened, but spring started to bloom some more and life went on as normal.
Our estate seems to have more cats than houses.The garden fences around our houses act as a kind of highway for cats and you will often see a cat or two travelling via fence.  Some years back, we used to have a bird feeder and we had lots of wild birds visit our garden, but year by year more families seemed to acquire a kitten that then grew up and now there are a host felines all around us.  After a few years we found the garden became a magnet for cats and the birds started to stay away, so we got rid of the bird feeder but still have the bird table.  This is now made use of for another purpose by our next door neighbor's cat.

The cat highway in use

It is the habit of our neighbor's cat to sit on this fence post and survey the world.  As a kitten it was a secure perch, but as she grew the post must have seemed to have shrunk and now does not have quite enough room for all four paws any more.  So she sits up there with one paw held in front of her whilst she decides where to go.

Slimbridge

In May, we went to the Wetlands at Slimbridge once again  and saw a lot more birds than the last time we visited.  At that time of year only the winter birds were there but in the spring you see the mother birds with their young and so a lot of chicks / ducklings / goslings, and whatever other strange names young birds have, were around for several different species of birds.

Mother Goose

 The Cranes were more cooperative on this visit and we saw a family with one rather larger chick than some of the other bird families.

A family of cranes

Cranes in flight over some avocets

Whilst we were eating lunch, this crow came and started to beg for food.  You are not supposed to encourage them, but this particular fellow was so tame that I succumbed and gave him a few bits from my sandwich.

Whilst we were there, we were lucky to see a pair of Kingfishers and as a personal first, I was able to get some reasonable pictures and not just a flash of blue.

Female Kingfisher with a fish

We wandered all afternoon seeing more birds and then went to the Tudor Arms for a meal.  The pub is by a swing bridge across the Gloucester and Sharpness canal on the only road in and out of Slimbridge.

An avocet taking off

Dive, dive, dive!

Formation flying 

This one seems to be suffering from a fit of shyness, but was about to dive

Mother goose keeping her goslings warm

A swan in flight

This canal links the upper reaches of the River Severn with the tidal reaches at Sharpness.  After dinner, we walked along by the canal for a while, with me looking at the boats and after a short stroll, we returned home after an interesting day.

Not the usual canal boat, but this canal leads to the sea and a lot of seagoing vessels come up to Gloucester along this waterway.