I am ashamed.
Sigh.
SOOO, after we found out for sure we were getting John's pay as usual, plans continued for John to purchase his toy of this deployment--a motorcycle.
John and his battle buddy/personal friend, Tom Stoffel went on a quest to find John's new (used) bike.
The week prior a deal with a friend fell through so John was having to start over in the wants versus needs of what kind of bike he wanted.
To my dismay, I dug my own grave, by looking on craigslist.com and finding an ad for a motorcycle that looked like something he was looking for. I asked around about the specs of it and turns out it was a pretty good deal, so Tom and John made plans to go check it out.
Well, lloonngg story short, it was "the one."
Am I an awesome wifey or what?!
So on April 9th, John and Tom went to Stedman to get his bike.
Well, on the 8th, a co worker mentioned that the weather for the weekend was 100% chance of rain.
Ok, well that sucks for motorcycle weather, but ok.
While Tom and John were out getting on their motorcycle madness, the clouds came rolling in and brought in the most beautiful rain smell ever. The lightning started, the thunder rumbled, and eventually the power went out...but hey, we get rainstorms here all the time, so didn't think anything of it, it is what it is.
A couple hours later the guys drive up with the bike into the garage just as the clouds broke open and it was like God took a swimming pool of water and just dumped it on our house....
So we are sitting in the garage, with the door open, watching the rain, the guys drinking a beer playing on John's motorcycle.
Then the winds started to blow.
Like, really started to blow--to the point where we closed the garage and went inside and started a game of checkers while waiting for it to stop raining.
I get a text from my girl, Steph that a tornado dropped down by their apartment complex.
I read it...I understood it....but I didn't comprehend it...there IS a difference.
Not to say I didn't believe her, but I read her text and was like, huh, well we are under a tornado warning, but if there was a tornado at her house then there would have been one at ours too, and there wasn't so....hmmm.....
Not even 15 minutes later the rain stopped and it was the most bright sunshine you'd ever seen came bursting through the windows. Kids ran outside to play, one with his kite, running down the road trying to collect on the final wind gusts breezing by.
We decided to take a few pictures of the motorcycle and John to commemorate the big day...notice the driveway still wet...sigh.
Sweet, the rain stopped, lets go get some dinner to celebrate the bike...even though he can't legally drive it yet, LOL.
So we hop in Tom's truck pull out of our subdivision and immediately notice all the power is out on the big streets...The traffic lights aren't even blinking.
Well that's weird!
We drive on to Panera Bread and it's empty, power is out.
We drive towards post, all the while I'm texting Steph, telling her maybe we shouldn't all go bowling tonight as we planned cause if Fayetteville is out of power, Bragg probably is too.
As I'm texting and we're driving we come up to one of the main gates to Bragg, called All American. It's backed up as far as the eye can see and to my complete surprise, people are turning around and driving down the median the opposite direction and going up the off-ramp of the exit behind us.
What the heck...??
That's when I get a text from Stephanie saying, "Katie, I don't think you realize how bad this is."
Ok, we're obviously missing something.
I guess we aren't going bowling.
Let's just go home.
So we turn around and head home, well at this point all the main intersections are lined with Fayetteville Police squad cars directing traffic cause all the street lights are still out.
We come up on the intersection where we would turn to go to Steph's house, and they aren't letting anyone go down the road that direction.
Weird......
We get home and because we still have no power, I have no internet or tv to see what's going on, so Tom decides to brave the Bragg gates to get back to his barracks, while John and I run damage control on our poor animals who hate the thunder.
The power comes back on later that night, but our cable and internet are still down. I call our service provider where they have an automated message saying that due to the TORNADO service is down and they are trying as fast as they can to restore service.
Tornado...what tornado?? Oh, that one Steph texted me about??
It can't be, we only live about 2 miles away from them....how could there have been a tornado and we not see it....or rather, HEAR it.
Then our phones start blowing up from all the people we know all over town letting us know they are ok, and wanting to know if we are ok....
Ok from WHAT?!?!
Like, seriously? A tornado was over by us??
What is all this about, seriously.
The next morning John and I decide we need to go investigate this craziness. Well, we didn't get too far. We could only turn one way out of our neighborhood cause the police had it blocked off...well that's weird...fine, so we went the long way. All the street lights were still out....but power was back on here and there throughout town, so we went to the local Walgreens and I bought a newspaper to see what was going on...and here's the story I see on the front page...
http://www.fayobserver.com/articles/2011/04/16/1087211
Along with this article was a map of this tornado's path and my heart sunk....we were right in it and had no idea....we were standing in our garage, with the door open, watching the rain, messing around with John's new motorcycle with absolutely no idea that we were in any potential danger....
Here's the map, where the PINK STAR is where we live, RED STAR is where Steph lives...
We are so naively blessed to not only just have rain ourselves, but that all our friends are ok too.
A couple of our friends had to tough it out the next couple days when it came to power, etc. Lots of patience tried and food wasted....TONS of damage everywhere.
There is still a lot of damage, and as I write this post, two weeks later, we are under another tornado warning....Apparently there aren't sirens here like in good ole OK to warn me of imminent danger, so lesson learned here, is not matter if you live in a state that calls a snow day for "potential of snow," take the thunderstorms and tornado warnings seriously.
Or close the garage door at least.
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