Twister

Wade and I woke up this morning in Destin to a huge thunderstorm. It was the scary, house shaking kind of thunder. It poured and rained and then poured some more. The storm let up a little about the time we were meeting my dad and Laura for breakfast. (They just happened to be in the same area this weekend – how random!) Then we packed up and headed back to Atlanta.

Most of the drive home was cloudy and it got stormy the closer we got to Atlanta. Then traffic seemed to stop. It only took us a minute to realize that it had begun to hail and cars just stopped under the bridge – blocking traffic. Since I have heard horror stories of the damage hail can do to cars (and this was big hail) we got off the interstate. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. All of the covered gas stations were full with cars.

We just picked a random road leading away from the hail and drove. At one point I turned to look at the clouds and thought I saw a funnel cloud. I pointed it out to Wade and then we started to see things flying in the air – it really was a tornado! I was chicken so we drove away from it – Wade wanted to drive toward it. In the end, we pulled off the road and the tornado passed by, closer than we realized. Here are a couple pictures. Look closely – it is the narrow white cloud in the middle of all the dark clouds.

The tornado is in the middle of this picture, but behind the tree. If you look closely you’ll see the dark outline.

After the cloud had passed by, we continued down the road to the interstate. Traffic slowed at one point about 1/3 of a mile down the road. We realized the tornado had hit this house. There was debris in the roadway and the other side of the house had even more damage than the side in the picture – how scary.

If we hadn’t stopped, but kept driving we would have been right in it’s path!