I realize that tornado warnings are nothing new for many people, but for two girls from Arizona… it made for a very long and eventful night.

As I began to tell you yesterday, late Saturday night, after the family reunion, we received an alert on our cell phones at about 9:30.

Sloane and I were in our hotel room, watching a movie when the alert came through. Neither of us had been anywhere close to a tornado before and we weren’t sure what we were supposed to do or where we were supposed to go to “Take shelter now.”

I called down to the front desk to ask the manager, who we had already become friendly with. He was somewhat amused, especially since he hadn’t heard of any warnings yet. He then advised that if we needed to really find shelter we would hear the sirens. We shouldn’t worry if there was only one siren, that meant there was a fire. Two sirens meant there was a fire in town, but if we heard eight sirens, then that was for a tornado.

Um…OK, eight sirens, and then what? Where do we go if we hear eight sirens?

If there are eight sirens, we are to come down to the lobby and the safest place is by the soda machine. The soda machine?!?

I said, “You’re lying! The soda machine? That can’t be the safest place, the damn thing might fall on you!”

He laughed and said, just come down to the lobby if you hear the sirens.

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