As a child, I was terribly frightened by the movie the Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t the witch, the trees, or even the monkeys. The idea of a tornado coming and tearing up my house and carrying me away from the comforts of my home and family was really quite traumatizing. 😥

With age and a little therapy, I’ve been mostly able to overcome this fear. But the other night I couldn’t help but remember how my siblings and friends would taunt me about our neighbor’s car – an Oldsmobile Toronado. As I tried to drift off to sleep, the unmistakable sound of a distant tornado warning siren kept me wide awake. Hey, I saw Twister.

As the man of our little lightweight home on wheels, I did my best to maintain composure while Jerry freaked out and René proceeded to gather her clothes so they would be handy. Yeah, right, like where would we go?

I attempted to calm everyone down – including myself – by explaining that we were in the safest place we could be. The fact that a local Sheriff’s deputy had visited the campground earlier to warn us about the pending storm didn’t help my cause. But they did the same thing two nights prior, and the heart of that storm missed us by a few miles. I’m still wondering if Eau Claire County has excellent emergency service infrastructure, or just bored cops with nothing better to do.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tRoi5OAQVU[/youtube]

I really did figure we were best off in the trailer, as opposed to being in the truck in search of a local shelter, or the old brick pit toilet nearby. The worst that could happen if a tornado actually hit us directly? Without a foundation to be ripped off of, we’d most likely be tumbled around the bedroom while our trailer bounced around the campground. A long shot indeed. What kept me up most the night was waiting to hear a loud repeated crack of our solar panel breaking under the reported golf ball sized hail, which thankfully never came.

Check out our Full-Time RV Videos page to watch a sample of the light show and hear the severe weather warning we listened to on our Motorola Talkabout walkie talkies. These have a weather channel scanning option that let’s us tune into local NOAA weather reports and storm warnings – highly recommended for any full-timer. The NOAA website is also a good place to track potential storms. If you’re using satellite internet, just remember to put your dish down if winds are expected to reach 50MPH or greater.