I'm at the airport waiting for my flight
and had to share this.

My friend Richard drove me to DC for the plane. As we drove north on 95 the clouds looked increasingly dire- and then the weather service broke in on the radio to warn of a tornado.

Hitting right about where we were.

We looked at each other. "Get off at Ashland. The coffee place is a masonry building."

As we drove through the truck shook in the wind. He looked to our right. "What the hell is that?"

There was stuff in the air thirty feet away. "Get us out of here! That's the fucking tornado!"

It swept over us, and we got to the coffee place in a violent storm. We holed up for a half hour. As we watched the storm there was a bang and the place was lit up. Lightning had struck less than a hundred feet away.

It's a good thing I don't take omens seriously.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 2 Jul 2009, 6:05, 6 replies, latest was 17 years ago)

oooh, close!
2 weeks ago, the boyfriend was in Nebraska for a funeral. He's sat on the plane waiting to take off, when they announce a tornadao warning the next county over.
The pilot says "we're safe for takeoff" and promptly does. The 1 1/2 hour flight turned into a 4 hour flight as they flew above and around storm systems to get to Denver..........I've never hit F5 on CNN as much as I did that day.........
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Thu 2 Jul 2009, 6:08, Reply)

holy shit.
that's pretty frightening!
But am glad you're both okay.
(Poppet some assembly required., Thu 2 Jul 2009, 7:59, Reply)

Bloody hell
It's time like that make me glad we have rather uneventful weather over here. Most of the time.

You could have stayed in the car though, and been sucked to some magical mystery land, full of robots and where the currency is some form of engineering puzzle -the more expensive, the harder it gets.
(Potty Jag har smör i min rumpspringa, Thu 2 Jul 2009, 8:23, Reply)

The UK
I believe has the highest number of tornadoes per unit area of land anywhere outside the USA. Except of course that's just a statistic, and is countered by two factors:

1 - we've got bugger all land area compared with the US, and
2 - most of the tornadoes are little weedy funnel clouds, and rarely do any damage.

We don't really do extreme weather here, thankfully. Look at this so called heatwave - we're getting to over 30°C and the nation is on alert. Many parts of the world have summer temperatures higher than this routinely. It's just that they're used to it.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 2 Jul 2009, 8:28, Reply)

Did a cow get caught up in the machinery? And did you drop thousands of lottery balls into the tornado for "research"?
( whenanimalsattackhumans clad in global hypercolour, Thu 2 Jul 2009, 8:54, Reply)

I did make a reference to cows.
took Richard a moment to get it.

It was a small tornado, but they can change pretty fast. Seeing stuff swirling into the air was a bit spooky.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 2 Jul 2009, 14:45, Reply)