Pecked by Ducks

I almost killed my entire family yesterday.

I know, that sounds crazy, and not something one should make a joke about, so let me be more specific. I drove my husband and sons within hundreds of feet of a tornado yesterday.

Seriously.

We missed it literally by 1 to 3 minutes and I could see the swirling clouds over my left shoulder.

Just finding news reports to link to this post is making it hard to breath and I’m shaking.

So it was Cinco de Mayo, and since Rocio is from Mexico, Captain Smartypants and I wanted to do something to mark the celebration for her. I searched online and found that this awesome Mexican restaurant, Dos Taquitos in Raleigh was having a Cinco de Mayo party, so we decided to meet her and the boys there for an early dinner.

We arrived at 5pm and got right in. They had live music, lots of drinks (I only had 1- a pina colada of course) the food was amazing, Rocio loved it and by the time we left, there was a 3 hour wait for seating. Also by the time we left it was pouring down rain. We got on 440 South to Route 1 South out of Raleigh towards Cary when it started raining so hard I had to watch the yellow line to stay in my lane. When the wind started blowing sideways I asked Judd to check his iPhone because I had never seen anything like it before.

He said there is a tornado in Cary headed North towards Raleigh and that it should be at the intersection of Route 1 and Cary Parkway at 6:47 pm and to be careful that the tornado might be obscured by torrential downpours. We were on Route 1 and we looked up to see the sign for Cary Parkway. I looked at the clock… 6:48. Just then, we burst through a wall of rain into deadly calm and I swear to you the air looked green.

Ominous was the first word that came to mind. I have seen weather like that on TV but never in real life. Give me 7 feet of snow and I know exactly what to do, but I had never seen anything like that before. There were dark swirling clouds as far as the eye could see, roiling and boiling right at building height. Everything looked greenish and it felt… well, it felt dangerous. That was when I looked back over my left shoulder and saw the swirling funnel cloud reaching towards the ground not 1000 yards away. I told Judd to watch it.

He (Captain Smartypants) said well what are you going to do if it changes directions? And I said, I am going to stay calm and keep driving away, but if it switches directions I going to drive like Grand Theft Auto until we find an overpass or a good ditch so keep watching it.

Thankfully it kept going North and we kept going South.

Quinn was playing the PSP and Max was watching a video. They never knew a thing.

But seriously?

HOLY CRAP!