A Bit Scary!
~Thursday, March 25, 2021~
Day 284
The weather forecast for today looked like it would be just a few afternoon showers with nothing major. But actually it turned out to be one of our scariest days yet. Jeff and I had taken Sadie on a hike around the lake, about 20 minutes from our campsite. We had gotten about ¾ of the way around the lake when Jeff’s cell phone showed an emergency alert…..”tornado warning…..seek shelter immediately”. Not a tornado watch, but a warning…...and a first for us. The last time we had any kind of tornado watch was in Louisiana about a few months ago. We hoofed it back to our campsite wit an increasing amount of rain until we finally made it back. We turned on the local news and sure enough, Greenville County was on an advisory to shelter in place. Obviously being in a trailer is not the safest place to do this. Within minutes we were in the bathroom directly across from our campsite, where another woman and her husband were also seeking shelter. I took comfort in knowing I was with a local who was used to these. I had mentioned that I was surprised that more people were not sheltering with us, but obviously a lot of people don’t heed the warnings. As we talked about the storm, we also talked about a plan of where we’d go if things really got bad. Luckily the bathroom was made out of cinder block, and inside, more cinder block construction for the shower stalls, so bingo….that would be the place to be. After about 20 minutes of sharing storm stories and Sadie wondering what the heck we were doing hanging out in a bathroom, we got the all clear.
It looks like the most dangerous part of the storms, that seemed to appear out of nowhere, creating its own weather system, were north and south of us, pushing east. It just goes to show how fast these storms can change. Apparently the warm, muggy air just southeast of us was 20 degrees warmer than here. That collision of warm air was powering this storm. As we sat in the trailer, the skies were really getting dark which brought with it, lots of rain, lightning and thunder. So dark in fact that 4:00 looked like 7:00. But the news said our area was not to be affected any further on the tornado front. We later found out that Alabama got the worst of the storm with 5 people dead and a huge pathway of destruction. And the warnings are not over. So stay tuned……..