Traveling Huntleys

Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.

Road Trip

Crossing Tornado Country in an RV: Nine Years of Planning Travel Around the Weather

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Last Updated: September 9, 2026

For nine years we left Florida in April and drove north. It was never a casual decision. April is when the country’s severe weather season is at its most violent across the Deep South, and we were crossing it in a house we had to tow. The worry came back every single spring, and it was the one part of the calendar we never fully solved.

We went anyway, and the reason was flowers. Leaving the Gulf coast in April and working slowly northwest meant traveling inside the spring itself — redbud and magnolia and fruit blossom in the southern states, then daffodils and tulips, then the woodland flowers coming up through last year’s leaves: bloodroot, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple. Keep moving north at the right pace and spring never ends. It takes four to six weeks to get from Florida to the Rockies at three hours of driving a day, which is how we traveled, and that put us into the mountains just as their spring was starting. Yellowstone’s RV parks open around the end of May. The Canadian parks open mid-May into June. It all lines up.

Here is the part we only understood properly much later. The thing that made the April departure worth it — the bloom moving north — is driven by exactly the same machinery that makes April dangerous. Warmth pushes north out of the Gulf, the jet stream follows it, and the boundary between the two is where both the wildflowers and the tornadoes are. We were not traveling near the severe weather season. We were traveling with it, at about the same speed, for six weeks, every year.

What follows is how we actually handled that, and everything else the sky did to us over nine years: wind, snow, cold, heat, hail and hurricane season. Some of it is what we got right. Some of it is just luck, and we should say so plainly at the start — in nine years we were never once in a situation where we had to take shelter from a tornado. That is not a technique. It is mostly the result of being unwilling to drive on days other people drove.

Snow, Sequoia National Park, California
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Kentucky Travel Guide: Mammoth Cave, the Bourbon Trail, Red River Gorge and the Land Between the Lakes

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Last Updated: September 9, 2026

We have crossed Kentucky twice, two years apart, in two different rigs and two very different springs. The first was March 2020, northbound out of Nashville and the Natchez Trace in our Newmar motorhome, arriving at Mammoth Cave the day after the National Park Service cancelled every underground tour in the park. The country was closing behind us as we drove. The second was April and May 2022, a full month in the Airstream with Jake the dog, working west to east and then back again across the whole width of the state — caves, bourbon, sandstone arches, elk, and a tornado scar we did not expect to find.

Kentucky rewards that kind of slow crossing. It is a small state that behaves like several larger ones stacked together, and after eight posts and a month on its back roads, three things kept surfacing. The first is rock. Most of south-central and western Kentucky sits on Mississippian limestone, which water dissolves — that is why the longest cave on earth is here, why springs rise out of hillsides, why creeks vanish into the ground mid-field, and why the floor gave way under the National Corvette Museum in 2014. Push east and the limestone disappears under a hard cap of sandstone that water cannot dissolve, only undercut, and you get the opposite landscape: no caves, but a hundred natural arches and a waterfall that has walked itself upstream for miles.

The second is that a striking amount of Kentucky’s public land was paid for by a private fortune made in something else entirely. Bourbon money bought Bernheim Forest and gave it away. A du Pont chemical fortune bought Cumberland Falls to stop a power dam and handed it to the Commonwealth. Red River Gorge is the variant with no money in it at all — that one was saved by people who simply refused to let it be flooded.

The third is quieter and runs underneath the first two. Somebody paid for these places. Mammoth Cave National Park was assembled by condemnation, and the farms, churches and cemeteries are still in there. Land Between the Lakes was created in 1963 by moving roughly 800 families off a peninsula and leaving 270 cemeteries behind. None of that makes these places less worth visiting. It just means somebody paid for them, and it is worth knowing who.

This guide is organized geographically rather than in the order we drove it, and each section links to the full post — photographs, practical detail and all — for that part of the state.

Cave Hill, Louisville, Kentucky
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Custer, South Dakota: Wind Cave, Custer State Park and the Hills That Were Never Sold

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Last Updated: September 14, 2026

Two facts sit inside a twenty-mile circle here. The town is named after the officer whose 1874 expedition found gold in these hills and broke the treaty that guaranteed them to the Lakota. And the cave south of it is where, in the Lakota account, people came into the world. You can drive between the two in half an hour.

Dr. Michael Huntley, physician, photographer, artist, among the granite spires of the Needles Highway, Black Hills, South Dakota
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Interior, South Dakota: Badlands National Park, the Stronghold District and a Landscape Halfway Gone

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Last Updated: September 14, 2026

The Badlands are almost exactly halfway through their existence. Water began carving them out of the prairie around 500,000 years ago, and at the current rate of about an inch a year, the Park Service expects them to be gone in roughly another 500,000. Everything in the photographs below is temporary. That is not a melancholy thought so much as a useful one, because it explains why the place looks the way it does — nothing here is hard enough to last.

Dr. Michael Huntley, physician, photographer, artist, and Sandy Huntley on the Badlands Loop Road, Interior, South Dakota
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Mitchell, South Dakota: The World’s Only Corn Palace, Oscar Howe and a Thousand Years of Corn

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Last Updated: September 11, 2026

Mitchell sits on Interstate 90 in the southeastern quarter of South Dakota, about an hour and a half northwest of Yankton, and it is known for exactly one thing: the World’s Only Corn Palace. That claim sounds like small-town bluster. It is literally true, and the reason why turns out to be the most interesting thing about the building.

American white pelicans on the open water of Lake Mitchell, Mitchell, South Dakota

This was the last stop of a long month — Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa and now the eastern edge of the Great Plains — and the weather had not finished with us. Sustained winds over 20 mph with gusts past 50, rain, and nighttime temperatures near freezing. We were still inside the country that produces spring tornadoes and we kept the truck pointed out, ready to move if we had to. That habit is the subject of its own post, Crossing Tornado Country in an RV, and this was the third campground in a row where it earned its keep.

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Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet Bluff

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Last Updated: September 11, 2026

This was a week governed almost entirely by the weather. We left Branson and ran north up the Missouri River valley in three hops — an hour to Springfield for an Airstream repair, then Blue Springs outside Kansas City, then Onawa in western Iowa, then Yankton, South Dakota, on the river below Gavins Point Dam. Rain cut Kansas City short. Iowa gave us three days of steady thirty-mile-an-hour wind with gusts to sixty. And the whole route was shaped by wanting to stay out of the way of spring storms on the Plains.

Glassy still water on Lake Yankton below Gavins Point Dam, Yankton, South Dakota

That is Lake Yankton at the end of it, flat as a sheet of glass, three days after we had been building windbreaks out of the truck in Iowa. If you want the argument for why we planned our travel the way we did for nine years, this week is the whole thing in miniature — and it is written out properly in Crossing Tornado Country in an RV.

It is also where the spring finally caught us. We had been traveling inside the bloom since Florida, moving north at roughly the pace the season moves. By the time we reached the Missouri there were Canada geese with goslings on the bank and wild turkeys displaying in the campground, which is the point at which you stop arriving early and start arriving on time.

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