I'm Not A Storm Chaser, Really!

I moved to Florida from New Jersey (where the only worry was, how high should my hair go today?) when I was nineteen. My mother bought a mobile home (A.K.A. trailer) for my son (then 2 years old) and I to live in. It was actually really nice!

A few weeks after settling in, I watched the movie Twister for the first time. You know, the one with the "flying" cows.... The very next night, we were under a tornado warning, I shit you not. Not just a watch, but a warning. Meaning, a tornado is going to take your mobile home and gobble it down as an appetizer in ten minutes! I freaked out.

I remember attempting to sleep that night with the TV left on, tuned to the news. Every two and a half minutes the siren would go off with the red band flashing on the bottom of the screen reminding me of my doom.

There were no visible funnel clouds that night.

Flash forward a few years and my now husband was living with us. Guess what? Another W.A.R.N.I.N.G. was occurring. This time though, when looking outside, the sky looked like this:


Okay fine. It looked a little more like this:



What did I make my husband do at this point?



Okay, that might be a bit dramatic. I did make him drive around though:



There are instructions for when you're already in your car and a tornado forms. There aren't instructions that say "If there's a tornado warning, get in your car and track it down!" Unless you're a storm chaser and you're going against all the rules!

My husband probably shook his head, argued with me for a minute, whatever. In the end, I won and we drove.

There never was a tornado. To this day, 24 years after initially moving here, I've never seen a tornado. Well, not including all the times I've seen Twister on TNT since then....