First Storm Chase of the Season!

First off, we are huge weather buffs, and I'm pretty sure we have agreed that when the kids hit their teenage years, we are doing a bus tour through the Tornado Alley during peak season, in hopes of catching a few twisters out there.

Yesterday was a day filled with rain...on and off all day. Perfect conditions for weather to pop up out of nowhere. We worked on dinner a little early, in case we were gonna lose power or something (which it doesn't matter since the stove is gas..duh me!) We had "Krabby Patties" and "Kelp Fries". The girls did decent with dinner, although they didn't try the meat, and the fries were homemade, which was a first for us.

Anyways...the baby was craving some Starbucks, so we packed up in the car a little after 6PM and headed across town to hit the forbidden place, and Lexi wanted a Rice Krispie Treat from the gas station...so we stopped there as well. While this is happening, we are simultaneously watching some beautiful clouds in the southwest sky. Nice cotton, fluffy, white clouds that Luke wanted pictures of. The only way we were going to catch them was to head further east to get in front of them, because they were moving pretty quick. We headed out Back Orrville and turned south on Eby Rd. and swerved through some back roads to a nice open field. The cotton clouds from town had disappeared, but the sky was still pretty, so Luke pulled over and snapped a few shots.



Pretty eh? Then we turned around and looked to the North. Boy that sky was dark. The clouds were hanging really low and we found ourselves right in front of a wall cloud of the approaching storm. We kept our eye on the front point of the wall cloud, because it really looked like it could touch the ground at any time!





Luke snapped the pictures and then dove for the car before the rain hit. We drove through a lot of heavy rain, and I took a bunch of video on my little powershot camera. When we got home, we looked at the radar and realized that we were actually driving through a tornado warning!



The 10PM news on Fox had a couple pictures from Wooster and Sugarcreek that had funnel clouds, but there were no reports of a touchdown. To be honest, looking at the pictures, we don't think they were funnel clouds, but the tip of the wall cloud instead. I've seen a funnel cloud before, and it looked different from those pictures, and if those were funnel clouds, then apparently I've seen a ton more funnel clouds in my life than I thought, even in storms where there were no watches or warnings!

When we got home the girls threw some rocks in our driveway we have now nicknamed "Cowgar Marsh", because it's one big mud puddle with some grass mixed in.





Anyways, Luke put together a very short video of some of the clouds and rain we saw yesterday. It's the beginning part of a song from the "Twister" soundtrack. We both enjoy that movie, so as more weather rolls our way this season, we will probably reference that movie a whole bunch :)