Telescopes and Tornadoes

If I want to share my road trip across six US states (and my thoughts beyond) then I need to get this reclusive blog out into the world! So hello world, meet blog.

Today, Lashi and I packed up the ‘Lighthouse’ in Columbia, Missouri, squeezed our stuff jenga-style into ‘Esmeralda’ (i.e. the car), folded ourselves gingerly in-between and set off for Tulsa!

You will notice my modest belongings are buried under Lashi's excessive collection of lenses, a telescope…and a singing gorilla.

Yep, a 60kg Celestron telescope. Photographing the Transit of Venus in Tucson, New Mexico on 5 June (with a bunch of other astro fanatics) is a key part of this trip for him. His excitement is most definitely catching, this astronomical event won't be repeated for another 105 years. The telescope is fully automated and very cool, we checked out some planets and globular clusters recently and it was magical.

I'm really excited about photographing the landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. I'm also checking out dinosaur fossil tracks, meteor crash sites, UFO crash sites, Cadillac crash sites…more on this later. And because I love clouds, I will be surveying the moody skies every day…with my Cloud Collectors Handbook within handy reach. Cloud Appreciation Society

I love being on the road, being entertained by wacky billboards promoting Gods Love (or Judgement)…and more randomly the ‘Olean Testicle Festival’ (gobsmacked by this one – involves fried turkey testicles apparently). I can even appreciate Lashi’s hourly rants about bad roads and bad signage. He really excels at the rant. I appreciate excellence.

First stop Marshfield, Missouri to check out the home of Edwin Hubble and to see the replica Hubble telescope. The town museum was also very cute, I especially liked the ‘I am a UFO Watcher’ t-shirt somewhat displaced amongst the Civil War memorabilia.

On the next part of the journey I found myself paying perverse attention to the weather. In states like Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, weather is a potentially life threatening consideration, and tornado season isn’t over yet! Lashi and I regularly check Wunderground.com for severe weather warnings but the weather is notoriously unstable.

With all this is mind, our next stop is Joplin, Missouri to witness the aftermath of an F5 tornado that ripped through there one year ago.

A whole corridor of Joplin a kilometre or more wide is still relatively bereft of houses and the lush foliage of the rest of the town (7,000 houses were destroyed). The branches on the trees left standing are snapped and twisted and folded in on themselves in a peculiar and eerie way. With the spring weather, these stripped trees have started to grow fuzzy green foliage very close to the trunk which adds to the surrealness of the scene.

We stood on a driveway by a single lamp in front of an empty lot, where a house should’ve been. It didn't feel right taking many photos here, but I did take a photo of this beautiful painted tree, a 'spirit tree' to channel healing energy in the Native American tradition of creating ‘spirit sticks’.

We continued onto Tulsa, our final destination for the day, tracking on or near the famous Route 66 and through Cherokee country. I didn’t get around to organising the Great American Playlist so all this was to a sound track of Indian Ragas (traditional Hindustani music) and not Elvis Presley! We hadn’t booked a hotel so we surveyed a few shady possibilities for $25 per couple, complete with toothless patrons, and went for the hardly more up market Motel 6.

Signing off with two cloud images, not technically from today...but from a day or two ago in Missouri!