Crazy Ridiculous Storm

Yeah, the title pretty much sums it up.

The storm only last about 20 minutes total, or at least that's how long it took to move through Raleigh.  But I tell you what, it was insane.

We were out and about starting at about noon.  First stop was Babies R Us to do our registry (again), and this wasn't too bad.  Tucker seemed to really enjoy looking at all the baby girl clothes, which is both funny and cute.  He even said that doing the registry made him more excited (this would be one of the very few times that he has vocalized this).  After the registry, we headed across Capital Blvd. to a used book store just to look around.  I don't know what it is about used book stores, but we love them.  After hanging around there for a little while, we decided we would go get some lunch, and conveniently, there was a Golden Corral right next door.  Happy day!

It was when we left that we noticed how windy it was.  We knew that there was supposed to be a storm today, so I turned on the radio when we got into the car and one of the local news stations had 'taken over' the music station.  When we started listening to it, they were listing counties that were currently under a tornado watch.  This didn't mean much to either of us, because unless we're looking at a map, we don't know where anything is in relation to Raleigh.  Anyways, we got home and got on the internet to try and look at what was going on (we lost our free cable this week sadly).  This was when the power started to flicker on and off.  Not a good sign.  Not super concerning, but not a good sign.

It was kind of annoying though, because we were now cut off from any updated information about the storm.  I made a comment about how it would be nice to have a normal radio right now so that we could at least hear updates.  This was when Tucker remembered the 72-hour emergency kit that his parents had given us for Christmas one year.  He was pretty sure that it had a hand-crank powered radio in it.  So I dug around for a little while in the closet and found the kit, and sure enough, there was a radio in it.  Woohoo!

Tucker cranked it up and we started listening to the storm updates.  The weather guys were saying that there was now a tornado warning for Wake county (our county).  Everything that they were saying was about a tornado that was on the ground and moving north-east; towards us.  This is when I started to get a little nervous.  They kept talking about how people near downtown Raleigh needed to get to a safe place immediately because they were in the track of the tornado.  We live only a few miles from downtown.  Yeah.  So we decided that we would head over to the Target near out house because it would be safer than our second story apartment.  I put a few things together in my backpack (72 hour kit, phone charger, 2 water bottles, our important documents folder (thanks for that idea Mom), and a couple jackets).

By the time we had this stuff together and had both gone to the bathroom, the rain was coming down in buckets and the wind was ridiculously strong.  We decided it wouldn't be any safer for us to head out now than it would be to just hunker down at home, so we moved to our little hallway and closed all the doors leading into it.  I'm sure it would have been quite funny to see, but at the time, with the news casters being all negative and stuff, it was kind of scary.  I took a couple pictures of us sitting there in the dark, but they turned out horrible, so they've been deleted.

Anyways, they started to report damage throughout downtown and moving our direction.  They started to mention streets that were only about a mile away from us, but from everything they were saying, we decided that the real danger was off to our east, if only just barely.  A few minutes passed and the radio reported that the tornado was now up in the area that we had been in for our outing earlier (yikes), so we came out of our hiding place.  The rain was still coming down, but the wind had died down a little bit.

In the end, our power was off for about 3 hours, and when we could get back onto the internet, we looked up the news website to look at pictures of what had happened.  Yeah, it was pretty bad.  If you care to look, the website is wral.com.  There was some pretty serious damage.  Not sure if anyone was hurt or killed, I couldn't find anything that talked about that EDIT :: Just checked the website this morning.  There are 10 confirmed deaths, but as many as 24 could be dead.  Very grateful that this missed us., but regardless, it was a crazy-ridiculous storm.