Arkansas Ozarks Vacation -- Day 9

Who was the Guest of the Day at our hotel in Hot Springs?  We were, of course.

Yellow, blue, and pink houses all in a row, near downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Here I am outside the Gangster Museum of America in downtown Hot Springs.  It was well done and our private tour guide was informative and entertaining.

Look!  I've captured Al Capone, using one of his own tommy guns.  This is at the end of the tour in the Gangster Museum of America.

Flags on the wall in the Colonial Restaurant, next door to the Gangster Museum of America, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The Arkansas state flag has four big stars near the middle, one for each of the four nations that have controlled Arkansas territory:  The United States, France, Spain, and...  and... Wait a minute, they claim the Confederate States of America was an actual nation.  Hmmm, not legally, I don't think.

Here is the Hot Springs Mountain Tower.  We went up to the observation deck even though the clouds were so thick that often you couldn't see the ground from the top of the tower and vice versa.

[There are no photos of the couple's mineral bath with aromatherapy, massage, and foot reconditioning treatment we enjoyed at the Quapaw Baths on Friday afternoon.]

Al Capone's 1928 Cadillac, on display in the lobby of the Arlington Hotel.  This was the last day it was on display; it was being sent back to its owner tomorrow. Chicago had black and green Cadillacs for their police cruisers, so Capone had his painted the same color to make it harder to identify.

After having dinner at the Porterhouse Steakhouse...

...we headed for home.  My plan was to drive to somewhere in southern Illinois, spend the night, then drive the rest of the way home.  But Mother Nature had another idea.  We left Hot Springs about 6:30pm, and it was raining heavily and storming by the time we got to Little Rock.  As we neared the airport, the rain was really coming down and Cathy pointed out a very black cloud immediately to our southwest.  We turned on the radio and got out the map and discovered there were several tornadoes in the area.  We hit I-40, heading for Memphis, and drove at high speed to attempt to outrun them.  But new tornadoes appeared to be forming as we went.  We finally decided it was too dark to see if we were in danger or not and it was better to be in a  building as opposed to on the road.  We pulled off in Brinkley, Arkansas, about half way between Little Rock and Memphis, and got a motel room.  For the next three hours we watched the Little Rock TV stations that were reporting one tornado warning after another.  At some point we said we had to go to sleep and if we "woke up dead" we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.  I took a snapshot of the following weather alert map.  Each little red blotch represents a county with an active tornado warning at that moment.  I blew up the map and counted them.  There were 18 of them --- 18 simultaneous tornado warnings in eastern Arkansas, right where we were. (This storm system, as it moved through Tennssee, wuld produce the devasting flash floods that killed about 30 people.)