Sometimes you have to leave a place to learn how special it is to you.

A girl named Dorthy Gale found that out in a most peculiar way. I’m in route to visit Dorthy’s house today.

Driving north on Hwy 83, the one running smack dab in the middle of America, I made it through the Texas Panhandle, crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle, and now I'm in the frying pan of Kansas.

As I have mentioned before, 83 has been called the “Road To Nowhere.” But I call it Heartland Highway, for reasons that become apparent when you drive any significant portion of the 1,885 miles stretching from old Mexico to Canada, right through the center of the United States.

Kansas is, possibly, the heart of Heartland Highway.

It’s been home to the Kickapoo people, Kaw, Cheyenne, Potawatomi, and other tribes. Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was the first European to visit, along with a small group of explorers in 1541, looking for the “Seven Cities of Gold.”

My trusty steed-on-wheels, ARGO, groomed by Airstream and powered by a Mercedes diesel engine, transports me past fields of corn, soybean, wheat, hay, sunflowers and a whole lot of Broom-corn, switchgrass, bluestem, and Indian-grass.

I’ve changed into a fresh brown short-sleeved khaki shirt, which harmonizes more with the farmers and ranchers when I stop at the local cafes along the way. But the cargo shorts and loafers with no socks still present a juxtaposition. No one has said anything; just guessing by the occasional once-over glancing from locals. It’s a long drive, so I’m more concerned with comfort. Know what I mean.

The state of Kansas continues to be noted as the beginning, and end setting of a Hollywood movie made way back in 1939, The Wizard of Oz. The story where a twelve-year-old girl, Dorthy and her dog, Toto, are transported from her aunt and uncle's farmhouse, suddenly, and not so elegantly, via tornado, to the mysterious fantasy land of Oz.

The story is based on the book by L. Frank Baum, published in 1900, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. His story captured readers imagination, and it became a hit with the first printing. The story was brought to life on the big screen in a dramatic, innovative way in 1939, engaging audiences on a worldwide scale. It’s what movie critics call, an “essential.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, then cancel whatever nonsense you had planned to watch on TV tonight, locate a copy of the Wizard Of Oz movie, throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave (adding extra butter of course), and watch. You’ll be taken on a beautiful journey.

Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland is endearingly adorable in the lead role of Dorthy Gale. The characters are archetypical of good and evil, from Glinda, the good witch, to the Wicked Witch of the West.

And the film’s special effects are a marvel, unique in the late thirties, and still, stand up today. Yes, kids, late thirties, well before computer generated movies with exploding-after-effects. Even the use of color was used in a special way, with the tornado scene in black-and-white, with Oz in color. And kids, this will throw you a curve, cell phones only existed in cartoons; the two-way-radio version worn on Dick Tracy’s wrist.

So here I am north of the Kansas/Oklahoma state line in the sweet little town of Liberty. I'm told it's a must-stop-place on Highway 83, the Heartland Highway, for at least one reason, to walk through Dorthy's House and the Coronado Museum. So, I guess I gotta go see it.

One resident of Liberty I chatted with at a local cafe, shared a little background letting me in on the secret:  "the town first rejected the Oz movie mystique hung on them, then decided to embrace it." Well, whether they would have decided to or not, the characters of Dorthy, her dog Toto, Annie Em, the Scare Crow, the Cowardly Lion, the Munchkins, the Wizard and all the rest of the cast, became linked forever to Kansas.

Tornados are also linked to Kansas too. Each county in the state has had approximately 30 to 50 tornados since 1950, according to the National Weather Service.

So, here I am on the walkthrough of Dorthy's farm home and the diorama recreating the Land of Oz. All beautifully camp-shtick. I'm being led by one of the adorable teenagers playing the role of Dorthy Gale. I’m told not to use her real name, so mums-the-word, so to speak.

This girl is part of the Dorthy Program, and I find out later, that is one of the cool educational dimensions of the place. Girls from middle school and high school are accepted into the program where they memorize lines from the movie, learn to tell the story, and guided to develop their confidence and speaking abilities.

Once they pass the test, they are bestowed with the distinctive farm-style gingham dress; step into the famous ruby-red slippers and become the personification of Dorthy Gale, the star of the story. One of these young girls is my personal tour guide today, narrating the journey of the fictional Dorthy, who was taken suddenly, amidst a violent storm, from a small Kansas farmhouse to the Yellow Brick Road in the mystical Land of Oz.

Mind you, this tour is not a Hollywood mega-budget production. It’s a fun odyssey by foot through adjoining rooms staged to tell the story. Starting in a typical Kansas farmhouse living room, we experience an approaching tornado as the windows begin to rattle, curtains whip erratically, lights flicker, and the wind roars louder and louder. Past the curtains thrashing back and forth over the window, there is a picture of an approaching tornado.

Now at this point, and on a personal note, very unexpectedly … this ominous simulated turmoil triggered a terrifying memory for me.

When I was six years old, I experienced the real thing.

My family was living in Durant, Oklahoma for a few years. It was dinner time, late afternoon on an April day, just before six o'clock. Mom was in the kitchen cooking fried chicken, along with black-eyed peas, and mashed potatoes and cream gravy. An apple pie cooling on the counter. All the mouth-watering, hunger-inducing aromas of a home cooked meal wafted the warm, unusually calm, afternoon air.

And yes, that is the way I grew up, with home-cooked meals every day (yes I know … strange in today's culture, at least in the USA).

So, nothing unusual about the day as I stood in the kitchen looking out the back screen door. My little six-year-old mind was deliberating, not sure if I wanted to go out to play for a few minutes, or talk mom into a pre-dinner chicken drumstick before we sat down for dinner around the kitchen table when my dad got home from work.

“Hey mom, that’s a funny looking cloud?” I said. She stepped away from the stove to a take a peek out the screen door to see what I was talking about. For a few seconds, mom just stood there next to me, staring out at the sky, processing what she was seeing. A thin tube of a cloud was wobbling from the wild-blue-yonder, all the way to the ground, and out of an otherwise clear sky. The rotating shaft was coming right toward us. It was getting bigger. I could now see stuff flying up from the land around the bottom of it.

“Oh my God,” she screamed in a panicked voice. “That’s a funnel cloud … a tornado!”

I  pushed the screen door open to go outside for a closer look.  Mom instantaneously grabbed my arm, pulling me away from the door as she turned full-tilt to extinguish the gas flames on the stove-top burners. She led me lickety-split into the center of the house while excitedly yelling for my younger sister to come quick. Cathy was playing dolls in her room. Cathy ran into the room to see what all the commotion was about, then grabbed on to mom.

“Get down!” Mom commanded as she pushed us toward the floor with her arms around us. “Cover your heads … get down!”

We did, and my mom started saying the Lord’s Prayer very intently, leading my sister and me. And it was recited with immediate, intense sincerity.

At six-years-old, I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but I knew my mom was scared for us. And that frightened me. Danger was lurking. I could feel my heart racing. My sister started crying. My mom did too.

Just like in Dorthy’s tornado simulation, the windows rattled, curtains flapped around. The wind picked up speed rapidly, and at the peak, the noise was so loud it sounded like, similar to how others have described, a freight train in the sky going right over our house. The loud noise faded almost as fast as it came. The air was still again. Silence.

We had been in the path of the tornado, but it shifted course, narrowly avoiding us.

Our house had some roof damage, but the neighbor’s home suffered more. I remember a tree was knocked down nearby. Limbs and debris were scattered about the yards.

My dad rushed in the door hugging us all tighter than ever.

It’s all vividly archived in my memory, along with the chicken dinner mom was making. When we finally sat down to eat, my mom was still very emotional, saying several times, “this meal could have been our last.” Later we found out three people were killed.

The next day my dad drove all of us to the nearby areas to survey the destruction. It’s hard to believe such devastation was caused by that funny cloud in the shape of a funnel. And by happenstance, I had seen it coming through the screen door.

When the tornado came to Dorthy’s house in the fictional story, she was knocked unconscious, before being swept up into the sky. She found herself transported to a strange land, a place that morphed her black-and-white Kansas farm world into one filled with color in the Land of Oz.

It was exciting, both the place and the new friends she met. But Dorthy, as a result of the terrible, yet color filled eye-opening ordeal realized what was most important to her, she wanted only to return home, to her family in Kansas.

Unlike Dorthy, I wasn’t knocked out or transported to any magical place via the tornado I lived through. But I do know what Dorthy came to realize. My family, my home, is the most valuable thing I have in life. Not the house, which can be blown apart in an instant by a funny cloud, but the most valuable thing of all: home, and all the word means. Home is the place where someone cares about us; where we are protected, understood and loved.

As Dorthy famously says in the final act of the movie, “There’s no place like home.”