Tornado: Part I

"We're not in Tennessee anymore..."

Last week my sister, my cousin and I decided to slip down south to catch some sun in Gulf Shores, Alabama. More specifically, last Wednesday, the 27th of April 2011, we decided to journey from one end of Alabama to the other. Unbeknownst to us, Alabama was on the verge of looking like this:

Red is bad.

From Nashville to Spring Hill we saw nothing more than a few isolated showers and dirty looking clouds. My aunt phoned and advised us to turn back because there were horrific storms on the way for Alabama. Being reliant on the weather we saw in front of us and being stubbornly determined to get tan, we disregarded her guidance and pushed through to northern Alabama (of note, you should listen to mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters and any other motherly figure that has your best interest at heart when it comes to weather...). We pulled off to fill up and grab dinner just south of the Tennessee border, officially entering Alabama Tornado territory. Sitting in the all too familiar Sonic Drive In, we sipped on fountain drinks and listened to the weather updates on the radio. Tornado landing in this town, and that town, tornado warning here and there...out of curiosity we pulled up a map on the GPS and to our horror discovered that we were surrounded by either an actual tornado or a tornado warning on all sides. We weighed our options and decided to order a hot fudge sundae and wait it out.



What's a blog entry without some microsoft paint action?

After dessert, we hit the road again-much to our mothers' dismay. We had high hopes and a glass that was half full until we reached Decatur, Alabama. A tenacious storm had welcomed us to Decatur, we fought through the visibility impairing rain and reached a clearing where we discovered that we were the only car on the road. Multiple cars and trucks were stopped under the bridge and the rest of the cars were parked on the exit. We followed suit and pulled off onto the exit where we found a police officer and asked what was going on. He looked at us like we had lobsters crawling out of our ears and answered, "a tornado just came through here, less than a minute ago. Y'all just missed it''. Our eyes adjusted to our surroundings and we saw for the first time that an 18 wheeler had been flipped on the median, trees were flattened and the billboard signs had been wadded up like paper and thrown on the ground. We had just been spared a horrific situation.

For whatever reason, this did not deter us and we continued to push on. I fully understand that many of you are thinking that we're idiots and you have my permission to mutter "idiots" or "morons" under your breath as you read this.

More rain, more dark clouds, more weather channel on the radio. As we entered Cullman County, the weather station announced that Cullman County was in the clear for the night, that Cullman could rest easy for the night. We sighed a big sigh of relief and were happy to be in Cullman.

You know the common joke that weather men have the only job where they're allowed to be wrong half the time and still get to keep their jobs? So not funny any more. The man announcing our good news of tornado free skies quickly changed his mind from ''sleep well'' to ''a tornado has landed in Cullman County. If you're in Cullman County, you have minutes to find shelter''. Seriously. This happened.

One of the many tornadoes that harmed Cullman County

We were so blessed to have been a few hundred yards away from an exit and pulled off quickly, green skies behind us. The town was completely black. No electricity anywhere. No street lights, no gas station lights, nothing but car head lights as far as the eye could see. In the darkness we saw a Comfort Suites and whipped under their awning and ran inside the hotel. The hail came crashing down and the flag out front wasn't flapping, it was standing straight out as if lined with wires. The tornado howled down the main drag of the town as a large group of good old country boys and small group of nurses watched in pure awe.



Thanks for the memories, Comfort Suites.

 As Cullman continued to get roughed up, the news reached us that I-65 was closed for the night, meaning that we were in need of shelter for the evening. Luckily, we were standing in a hotel that 'just by accident happened to have rooms available'.



Not to dog the Comfort Suite franchise, but I've paid less for hotel rooms in New York and Chicago. And those rooms had electricity. The whole scenario seemed like horror movie plot-and it's super scary wandering through the hotel with nothing more than your cell phone light or a oil lantern-which they had! And they were using them!

Way better than cable.

The room could have double for a sauna so my cousin and I used the Philips head screw driver in her emergency road side assistance kit to dismantle the safety hardware on the windows, popped those suckers open and let in a cool breeze. Since every single restaurant, drive through and gas station was without electricity they were closed and we were without food.



Anthropomorphism is so funny.

 Like little raccoons thieving a camp site, we slipped into the kitchen that night and took a half gallon of Breyer's Rocky Road ice cream, mountain dew, yogurt and fruit loop cereal up to our room. We laid on that queen size bed eating contraband rocky road ice cream and fruit loop cereal, listening to the rain sing its victory outside and laughed about our current situation: critical care nurses who needed a break from their stressful jobs were trapped in a town that had no electricity in Cullman, Alabama, in an insanely hot hotel that had no electricity, feasting on sugar and in one of the more stressful situations one could find themselves in-not the vacation we envisioned.

Exhausted from dodging tornadoes, we giggled ourselves to sleep-not knowing the devastation that awaited us the next day. Devastation that would be revealed by the light of day.

Blessings,

KB

P.S. Sufjan Steven's "Songs For Christmas" are lovely and never out of season.