So for those of you who are unaware...I live in Kansas (Insert obnoxious "Wizard of Oz" jokes now). If you don't live under a rock and haven't seen any kind of news source over the last 3 days...we had a massive string of storms come through the midwest and produced 122 tornadoes on Saturday. Of course 97 of those were in the fine state of Kansas. Given that I am born and raised in Kansas, I'm not completely terrified of tornadoes. I go about my day and hope for the best. This is precisely what I did on Saturday. My husband and I put the dogs up in their kennels and headed 1.5 hours south of our dinky little town to do some shopping in Wichita. Not just any shopping, shopping for dresses for my graduations. Yes the 's' is there on purpose because I have two of them. I'll talk more about that later. So we're taking our time shopping, watching the sky because we were unfortunately in the exact area that the weather stations predicted the bulk of the tornadoes. Still I wasn't worried, just trying to find me some dresses! We decided to stick around at eat dinner at this cute little Asian restaurant called Pei Wei, which is a sister company of P.F. Changs...and pretty amazing for half the price!
By the time we left Wichita it was around 5:30pm...and the storms were supposed to start hitting around Kansas between 4 and 5 pm. As we are heading home we are listening to the radio and start hearing about all these damn tornadoes to our east...but only like 30 minutes to our east. Whoops! My husband takes a back highway home "because it's quicker" but in reality he was following the weather a lot better than I was. I guess that's the California in him...a little afraid of those "naders". We got home just in time to here that there is a tornado on a direct path to the town 30 minutes east of our town, and that they expected it to hit the south end of town in less than 30 minutes. So we realistically had about 40 minutes to get into shelter and wait out the storm. The problem with this idea is that we don't have a basement. Why the hell does anyone build a house in tornado valley that doesn't have a damn basement??? Thankfully one of Kyle's best friends just bought a house a block and a half away from us, and they were more than willing to accommodate us and our 4 dogs. So we got home and loaded up 2 of the kennels in my husband's pickup, loaded up the 4 dogs and me in my Durango and we all headed to our friend's house. We stayed there from about 6-9 pm and had 2 tornadoes destroy quite a bit of stuff within 5-10 miles of our house. The tornado sirens went off about 3 or 4 times during this 3 hour period of time. Kyle and his buddy went to get some soda during one of the "breaks" and actually watched a tornado form and drop to the ground (this was 5 miles away from us). We left and came home around 9pm after all the warnings had expired..only to have to return at 11:30 due to a few more tornadoes in the area. It was around 1:15 am before we finally got home and started to get ready for bed. The irony is that the exact area we were shopping in on Saturday was hit by a tornado in Wichita and did a lot of damage. Also one of Kyle's coworkers was in a semi in Iowa that was hit directly by a tornado and thrown 300 feet (truck and him). His truck was destroyed and he was taken to the hospital. We're still not sure how bad his injuries are, but it looks like he might be released from the hospital this week.
This is the picture of the tornado that they watched form. It was taken by my husband from his truck around 7:30 pm on 4/14/12.
Oh about the best weekend of my life. I did not worry or think about school at all this weekend. I stayed super relaxed and just spent some quality time with my husband and dogs. It's not very often that I get to do that, so all in all it was very relaxing!
