tornado or not?

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.

We stood at our window and watched as the stars and stripes on a flag pole across the street went from being whipped all around to going straight up in the air. About the same time, street lights sparked and blew up all the way down the block.

There was so much lightning that you could have read a book by it. Then all the lights in the buildings across the street went out.

Sure enough, about 5 minutes later the sirens began. We went down the stairs to the lobby and used the house phone to call Dad’s room and told him to come downstairs. Of course, he’d slept through the sirens. He got dressed and met us in the lobby. By this time, the electricity in the hotel was out too.

Everyone in the hotel was in the lobby, though there was no room near the soda machine.

That area was occupied by all the frightened children and their mothers, who were doing their best to distract them with board and card games, by the light of flashlights and cell phones.

After more than an hour we were told we could go back to our rooms. The electricity was still out, so we used our phones and flashlights to make our way back upstairs. The wind was still howling, there was loads of lightning and it was still raining cats and dogs, but we went to bed and made it through the night.

I learned that a tornado did touch down several miles out of town and found this photo of it on YouTube, posted by a storm chaser.

Our alarms were set for 4 AM Sunday morning so we could make the four-hour drive back to Wichita to fly home to our hot and dry, but natural-disaster-free, Scottsdale Arizona.

It’s always good to come home!