Tornado or no Tornado

One other little interesting thing to take place on this trip, other then me getting sick, was whether or not we got caught up in the edge of a tornado.  Several years ago Buddy and I were coming back from a trip from Gatlinburg, TN we were traveling down a back road in eastern Tennessee.  You know the type.  It's cut into the land in such a way that you have about a four or five foot embankment on either side with trees lining it on either side and occasionally opening up to fields of farm land.  It was just past nightfall and and there is a storm raging all around you.  The stuff of horror stories and nightmares.
There is a flash of lightening and I look up to the windshield on Buddy's side of the vehicle and there in the center of the field not far from us was a tornado.  OK I really didn't see that now did I.  It was as if the powers that be wanted to affirm what I had just seen so with an even brighter and longer flash of lightening there in all it's glory was that majestic clone making it's way across a field.  My response was oh shit.  Buddy asked what was wrong and all I would say was "Nothing, just keep driving."  It wasn't until later that I told him what I had seen.
What are the odds that we would ever be caught in that situation again?  Slim to none right.  I'm not so sure after Sunday.  Now any of you who have traveled though Northeastern Arkansas know that about all you see are miles and miles of fields broken only by an occasional house or some other building. Well we were coming back to Memphis through that part of Arkansas and yes it had that stormy look all around us but no major rain or lightening or anything like that.  We noticed a rather unusual cloud formation that ran from the sky all the way to the ground.  It was like a large column or wall of dark clouds that was unlike anything we had ever seen except on the weather channel.
Buddy asked what it was and I told him what it looked like to me.  Shortly after that, and I'm talking a few seconds it got much darker than it had been.  Now Buddy isn't the type to panic or even get shaken over many things but this shook him.  A couple of seconds later it got pitch dark and we were hit by a straight line torrential rain and heavy winds.  You could barely see the hood of the truck little on the road.  It was at this point that one of our girls called to tell us there was a cell right where we were.  Buddy had been the one to take the call and all he said to Ginny was "I got to go Ginny, in the middle of something and hung up the phone.  He started to pull over but decided that us continue to move was the better idea.  We wanted put that mess as far behind us as we could and that's exactly what we did.  We never heard anything about a tornado after we got home but it certainly was something.  I took a couple of pics before it got to dark to take another.  If anyone has any idea about this let me know.  I am posting the pics I was able to take before the lights went out in Arkansas.






The pics really doesn't show what it looked like in person.