Dad's Note: Man... Elder Goodale certainly had an interesting week; the tornado experience sounds pretty amazing! He will transfer this Thursday to Joplin, Missouri in the southwest corner of the state. I have put in four web links to information on the city and surrounding area. I am also putting in some pictures we scanned from a couple of months ago. I don't remember the story behind it, but you can tell that Justin ended up in a nice pool of mud! There are also a couple of baptism pics that I've put in; one of them at a river! The pics have nothing to do with where I've placed them in the text of his e-mail below.
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Dear Family,
Hello! I can't believe it's already Monday again and I'm hear writing to you again! This week has just disappeared! I was on exchanges in West Plains Tuesday and Salem Thursday, then we also instructed at two different District Meetings this week, Wednesday in Houston and Thursday in Rolla. So we were all over the place, and it feels like this week didn't even happen. It's been a good week, though, we've found alot of good new investigators and things are really picking up again after a couple of pretty slow weeks. Things are actually going really well.
The only sad thing is I won't be here to see it. :( I'm finally leaving St. Robert! After over 7 months here, I'm getting transferred to Joplin, MO (
city website,
Wikipedia entry,
visitors bureau,
Joplin Globe). It will be by far the biggest town I've served in on my mission, which is kind of funny considering it's not very big... (I think it's around 50,000, but that's just a guess) It's about 2 and a half hours from here, down in the southwest corner of Missouri. I'm really glad I get to stay in Missouri instead of going back down to Arkansas or Oklahoma. :) It's really weird though, this will most likely be my last area! I don't know what to think about that... So I'm not going to. :) It should be really fun though because way back in April-June of last year I served in Miami, OK, which is in the same zone, so I'll get to go back and go on exchanges there! My new companion is Elder Anders, who came out a transfer after I did. He's an awesome missionary, I'm really excited.
So we had a pretty crazy experience yesterday...After church Elder Ewert and I split with two young men in the ward. Elder Ewert went with Rian Stroud, and they went out and worked in Richland for the day (another town in our area, about 15 miles west of St. Robert), and I stayed in the St.Robert- Waynesville area with Shawn Botti. He's an 18 year old recent convert who is getting ready to put his papers in in just a few months, and he comes out on splits with us almost every Sunday. Then we usually get another priest to go out with us to so we can split.
So Shawn and I were out tracting and we got caught in a massive downpour several blocks from our car. By the time we got back to our car we were totally soaked all the way through. We had been warned there was a big storm coming, but it had rained super hard and then there was quite a bit of thunder and lightning at the same time (yes, we were out tracting in a lightning storm) so when it passed over us we thought that was the end of the storm. If it had been, that in and of itself would have been a pretty good storm. So we got in the car, dripping wet, and drove over to an investigators house. Shortly after we went in, the tornado sirens started going off, and during that time the other two called us from Richland and told us that the storm had just passed through where they were and was on it's way toward us, but it wasn't that bad. At least it didn't hit them hard... The sirens only lasted a couple of minutes, then they turned off.
A couple of minutes later, we went outside and the sky was a really nasty greenish-blue color that usually comes with tornadoes. Then we noticed a huge fishook type cloud above us that stretched across the whole sky and basically divided the sky in half. The best way I can think to describe it was kind of like a big upside down Nike Swoosh symbol above us. That also means tornado, in case you ever see one. It's kind of eerie, looking, it's really hard to describe, both the color and the fishhook, but when you see it you know. It just doesn't look right. So anyway we left and started driving to our next destination, watching the clouds as we went. We could literally see the two different fronts, one east of us and one west of us, both moving toward us (in opposite directions of course) and that big fishhook was kind of right in the middle.
After just a couple of minutes of driving we saw one of the nastiest looking clouds I've ever seen (I didn't know at the time because it wasn't like the typical twister you think of when you think tornado, but I realize now that this was the tornado) moving right toward us. It was really really low, literally only about 2 stories above us (and dropping), we almost could have jumped up and touched it. It was moving very very quickly, and slowly rotating as it did so. It was kind of a sick feeling (but really exciting at the same time!) as this big spinning cloud came right over the top of us. Then immediately afterward we just got nailed by a big wall of water. The wind was all of sudden really strong, and it was raining like crazy, just coming in big sheets. Obviously my first thought was we need to get off the road, we can't be driving in this. We were driving right past a grocery store, so we quickly pulled into their parking lot. As we sat there watching the wind and rain, it grew very calm just for a few moments, then picked up again even stronger. We watched a big huge dumpster get thrown across the parking lot like a wad of paper, and that's when we started to get a little nervous. I then looked to my left to see a big box flying right toward my head. I just about peed my pants, but then it turned and flattened against the back end of the car. Somehow that left nothing but a little scratch, but then right after that we noticed all the shopping carts coming toward us! (Again, we are still sitting in the car) There were quite a few shopping carts, but luckily only one actually hit us, which was also pretty scary because it nailed the drivers side door, right where I was sitting (doing quite a bit of damage to the car). That was when we decided we needed to get inside. :)
So we pulled up to the front of the grocery store (dodging another speeding shopping cart on the way) and ran inside just as a couple of nearby trees went down and part of the roof of the grocery store was torn off. We didn't get to watch anymore from inside, though, because they moved everyone back to the meat coolers at the back end of the store where it was safest. We didn't go in though, because we were still dripping wet (we got re-soaked as we ran from the car into the store) and we didn't want to go into the meat freezer that wet. That would not have been fun... The worst of the storm was already past though.
So that was our fun adventure yesterday! Please don't worry or be scared at all, we are totally fine and really we were pretty safe. And we'll be sure to be inside before the storm hits next time. :) But that was our week. I love you all!
Love,
Elder Goodale
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| Damage to car from tornado |
