Yep. We arrive and the weather gods decide to indoctrinate me and possibly re-indoctrinate Scott with some crazy weather. At least They gave us time to unload the truck.
I should have known there would be something. On the way from New York we got some insane rain coming into Ohio. Top that off with the fact that I hate Ohio (at least I hate the Ohio I see from I-70). We decided to stop at a pet-friendly hotel only to find that almost every hotel was full. I guess all the travelers on I-70 decided to hit the hotels too. But we did find a place and settled all cats and kids by 2 am.
Anyway, back to the tornadoes.Warnings and watches crawled across every local channel on TV and we watched the Doppler radar like they were the Presidential elections (somehow I suspect more people watch the Doppler than the elections, but that's another story). So many counties were lit up with warnings and at one point the county we are in went red too. It wasn't until late in the evening that the first warning sirens went off.
It sort of brought me back to my first days in the Midwest before Scott and I were married. We house sat for his friends parents at the grandparents home, which is actually just across a farm field from here. Scott's mother told me, "If you hear something that sounds like a train, get in the basement." This Long Island girl was horrified. I'm not sure which statement scared me more, that or "If you have to call 911, don't give them the address. Just say Flora Lee's house and they'll find you faster." If I didn't love Scott, I'd have started driving back to NY right then and there. And P.S. I think they'd just recently gotten the 911 option. It was 1996.
So, the sirens go off in the town and my in-laws are saying its for the more southern part of the county. Good ol' Doppler is confirming that, but I put nothing past Mother Nature. I'm then informed that at our new place I probably won't hear the sirens... so I'll need one of those emergency storm radios.
Toto, I don't think we are in New York anymore.
Just before we put the boys to bed, the sirens go off again and it's determined that we should sleep on the main floor in case we have to get to the basement. Poor Aidan was really nervous and it took a while for him to fall asleep. Ciaran on the other hand went right out as he didn't understand as much. Then we lost power. Awesome.
At around 4 am, power returned and in the morning we woke up to a misty day. All in the clear. A few tornadoes touched down about an hour from here and a bad part of the storm had headed for Indy. Everything ended up ok there. Knowing what had happened in Joplin was nerve wracking but the tornadoes in and around Bloomington weren't as devastating.
Driving out to our house that morning, I decided to go a different way than I had been the day or two before. Intuition is an amazing thing because the way I went that morning wasn't really the way I like to go. But I did it anyway, and it avoided me seeing a lot of the damage initially. I didn't actually notice the big tree down in the front part of the property because I was too focused on the drive up the hill. But the big piece of tree lying in the drive caught my attention.
Scott and his father drove up behind me and we moved the branches. Then we got to the top of the hill to find trees snapped at their bases in the windbreak, large branches broken out of trees along the property, the lawn littered with small branches and our neighbor/landlords truck grazed by another tree. Power was still out because power lines were down. Actually the power poles had been snapped at the bases along the road I like to drive in on that I avoided. A barn had its roof peeled open like a giant came along and peeked into see what lived inside. And really, this was nothing. This was nothing compared to what that kind of weather can kick up.
Darren, our neighbor and Scott's friend said it was the worst tree damage that they'd seen up here. He held his arms out as he looked at me and said, "I don't know, Tamrha. Welcome to Indiana!"
