holy tornadoes!!

Jacob and I are in a dinner group in our new town of Salina and we had our first dinner the night of tornadoes!  The couple hosting just happened to live right in the path of the tornado, what are the chances?  I should have probably mentioned that they live at the top of an old college {sounds weird I know, but it's pretty cool}, so this is our view of the tornado coming at us.  All the girls ran downstairs and I was busy filling my glass of wine {I guess I thought it would help calm me down a bit ;)} that I missed the way to the basement and got stuck storm watching with the dudes.  I have always hated tornadoes and am usually the one running to the basement, but for some reason, I could not stop watching!  It reminded me of my dad- he would always be on the front porch while the sirens were going off and my mom and I were in the basement- so I was feeling a little bit like my dad :).

You can see the tornado dropping down a little here, still coming straight at us.  We had all the windows open and literally had our heads out the window watching it.  As it came closer to us, it got so still outside, like eerily still and then just huge gusts of wind came through the windows and you could see the clouds just swirling above us - really the most incredible/insane thing I have ever seen!  We kept saying, we should go downstairs, let's go downstairs and then we would just keep watching... scary, I know!  I got some video of it and you can kind of see the clouds swirling.

The girls came back up and we all crawled through a window to stand on one of the roofs of Marymount College {wine in hand} and continue to watch the tornado go on its way past us {thank you lord!}.  We saw it touch down not too far from us on a dirt road so you could see all the dust flying and swirling around.  

We ended up having a wonderful dinner + desert and tour of the college {they are turning parts of it into loft apartments}, to go back to more tornado sirens!  This time, we all went to the basement to the storm shelter.. it was too dark, we didn't like the fact that we wouldn't be able to see it coming.  Izzy girl was at Gigi and Papa's so they had to wake her up, which of course I was worried about, but she was safe!  It was so hard not being with her during the whole ordeal, but at least I knew she was being taken care of and safe.  

The paper showed the path of the tornado and we were in it, we were so lucky it didn't drop down on us.. all prayers answered!  Thank goodness!!