Operation Tally-Ho officially started yesterday.
Bree and I woke up pre sunsrise to catch our flight from San Diego to Dallas (via Denver) to pick up the RV we purchased on eBay last week. After months of looking and a few deals falling through we FINALLY found what looked to be a perfect RV for us and luckily we won the auction.
I checked out weather.com prior to leaving only to see that Wed Sept. 8 for Dallas had a picture of a big gray cloud, rain drops, and a thunder bolt and title “Thunder Storms”. Meh. I heard people on the plane talking about some pretty serious flooding in the city and thoughts of doom and gloom started to creep in. The thought of driving an RV, something neither one of us have any experience doing, on day 1, through heavy rain and possible flooding was not terribly exciting. Evidently the remnants of a hurricane now downgraded to Tropical Storm Hermine had just dumped near 10 inches of rain on the city. I think we get that much rain in San Diego in a YEAR.
Flying low over the city on approach I could see flooding all over the place. Rivers that had obviously broken the confines of their banks and large areas of water that were clearly not meant to be urban lakes since buildings were in the middle of them in places. Luckily the rain wasn’t falling when we landed. We picked up the RV without a hitch and headed from South Dallas up to Allen to stay with some friends for a few days before heading West back to Cali.
So we stop to get gas between Plano and Allen and as I’m standing outside filling the tank I keep hearing what sounds like these droning siren sounds. I almost poke my head in to ask Bree if she hears them but I don’t. In fact, I don’t even mention it or think much of it (I’ve heard sirens before) until we get a text from Bree’s friend about 30 minutes later. “Hey did you guys hear about the tornado in Plano” WTF!!!
Turns out those sirens I thought I was hearing I WAS actually hearing and they were tornado warning sirens. I’m from California. Never been to Texas or anywhere in the midwest for that matter. We don’t have TORNADO WARNING SIRENS where I’m from. Are you kidding me.
Not to say it wouldn’t be semi-exciting to look up and see a funnel cloud swirling down from the sky in the Natural Geographic sense of “semi-exciting” but needless to say, I’m glad that didn’t happen. I may have had to go Bill Paxton on that bad boy and start my storm chasing career early. Uh yeah, no.
It’s Friday morning now as I write this and the news is showing tornado damage from something like 2 or 3 different tornados that touched down in and around Dallas yesterday. The post picture is a photo from Dallas’s Channel 12 News website. I’m happy to say that we didn’t get funnel clouded and tossed into a flooded river somewhere on our first day of OTH and are safe and sound and excited for our upcoming journey home and adventures ahead.
Needless to say, Day 1 will ALWAYS be remembered. The day we dodged the tornado.
Tally-Ho…
RV Rookie,
Matt
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