I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. I have been negligent, but I think I have a good excuse. I have been really busy with my job, and we have had sickness in the family of late, so I just haven’t taken the time. I will do my best to pick back up though. 😉
So this is going to take a bit getting to the near death experience, as I would like to catch up some. I will skip backward to Christmas when we found out that we are going to be grandparents. Yes thats right, Smokin Hot and I have a grand baby on the way, and his name is “6”. Aka Charlie. He will be the 4th generation of John C Martins still alive today. Starting with the 3rd, who is 78 years old. (he may as well be 30) Anyway, Six will be coming to visit his daddy, Pop Pop and Great Grandaddy, around July 15th. I am so excited!! I didn’t know John C Martin the first, but John C Martin the 2nd died on Christmas day, I think in 1965. Believe it or not, I remember him well, and I miss him. He taught me to never eat Saltine crackers with my mouth open because it made a noise in front of people. He also always had orange juice in my thermos to drink while we were at the pool. He had a tobacco and candy business in Gulfport, Mississippi for a long time, and I have talked to many wholesalers who still remember him today. I miss you Pop Pop!
Immediately upon finding out about “Six”, Jill wanted to move closer to Johnny and Jackie. She wanted to be closer in order to help in any way, not to mention there was a baby coming. 😉 So we pulled up our jacks and moved to Swan, Texas. Tyler Oaks Resort was brand new, and we were the first to agree to move in. We would be only 4 miles or so from “Six”.
We have been at The Tyler Oaks RV Resort for four months now, and during our time here, it has rained almost every day. Well… not every day, but almost!! Not only has it rained, but it has stormed. We have had many very hard rains and lightning strikes, and huge thunder and even a close tornado or two. One Tornado, as a matter of fact, hit Lindale 2 months ago, just a few miles north and destroyed several homes. This brings me to last month.
I heard from my favorite forecasters that they were not happy with the forecasts for the following week. They seemed to think that we were in for some really bad weather. I don’t normally listen to them unless they use language that I don’t normally hear, like, explosive tornadoes, huge hail, long lines at insurance offices? So I researched a bit more and Jill and I decided that while we love weather, and we love the excitement that comes along with it, we are not in a normal home anymore and we should probably get out of the way of this one. I don’t normally shoot from the hip, but my gut was telling me that we need to sit this one out. Galveston was the closest “fun” place to go while we waited, so off we went that Sunday. I could do my business while looking at the ocean, and Jill could fish if she wanted!!
We left after church, I think it was around 3:00 pm. I expected to arrive at the Galveston State park by 7:00 pm. It was 9:45 when we arrived. The traffic was horrible!! Remind me to never move to Houston. If for no other reason, I hate horrible traffic and huge numbers of people. 😉
Monday morning I woke up early and I proceeded to the beach. I love the beach. I love the waves and the sand and the breeze. It was the ugliest beach I have ever been to. The state park does nothing to the beach and they leave it all natural. I would prefer a beach with a bit of dressing. Maybe a bit of something? There is just nothing there for the imagination. It was just a bland beach with trash all over it. UGH!! Bad storms would have been better. I felt so bad. Jill was going to have to come see this beach when she woke up, but then, she knows that Galveston Island is the ugliest beach in the Country. I don’t care if you hate me for saying it, but the beach is dog ugly. The only reason I go there is for the fishing and because it’s closer than any other beach. Sorry. I just hate it.
Jill loves to fish. I mean she really loves to fish!! Having this spot on the beach enabled me to work while my lovely got to go fishing every day if she wanted to. She actually talked me into going out there with her. I threw out a line while I watched her bring in catch after catch. She did really well! I love watching her have a great time!!
Tuesday was the day the bad weather was to happen in East Texas. It essentially came and went without any issues. UGH! I blew it. I really thought it was going to be bad!! Well….. At least Jill and I got to spend some time alone at the beach, eating seafood and being together. Nothing I would prefer to do, but we could do that in East Texas, so the weather was a bust. EXCEPT, we didn’t take into account that the storms would also come to Galveston. We woke up Wed. morning with the rain coming down in sheets. The water began to pile up and before we knew it, we had a flooding situation. We had to walk through shin-deep water to do anything outside the coach, not to mention, the ocean was rising quickly due to high winds from offshore. UGH!!!I took my family into the belly of the storm!!!
I have to take a quick break here to talk about how the weather works. I had no idea in this situation how things would go, so I was really worried about the 30 knot wind coming off the ocean to the north. The storms were headed due south with 70 mph winds. What would happen when they collided? Jill and I were sitting outside watching the event. The wind was just crazy coming off the water. All of a sudden everything stopped. Absolutely nothing. No wind. Dead as it could be. Incredibly eerie! 5 minutes later, the wind picked up from the north. It took the place of the wind from the south. They didn’t collide, the wind from the south just stopped?? The North wind then began. ???? God works mysteriously!!
The poor people who were camping in tents! They were sitting in water. The entire area was under water. Every single camping spot was at least 6 inches deep! Wow! This day was going to be difficult? Actually, the park, placed sump pumps at every location, and by 10 am, all the water was gone and flowing in a stream behind us. Very different way of doing it, but it’s the government. 😉
Ok, so its Friday and we were due to head back to East Texas. What I didn’t know, was that the weather was going to be worse than it actually was supposed to be on Tuesday. We were in trouble and we had no idea.
The coach was covered in salt and what I call Mung. 😉 It was so bad that we stopped at a truck wash and had the MH washed and cleaned. In the meantime Jill and I had not noticed that storms were building from the west and headed toward interstate 45. We were headed up 45 toward Buffalo. I jumped on the radar just in case and there it was. A line of storms that would keep me from continuing if I kept going north. I made a last minute decision to go east to Crockett, Texas in order to hopefully bypass the line of storms coming at us. We actually were able to go around the line and made it to the RV park with almost no use of our wipers. It was really surprising actually, however we had no idea just how bad things were going to be.
Jill asked me to go get dinner, as we were tired. I went to get some Mexican food and it took me about 30 minutes. While we were eating in bed, the local TV station interrupted the programming. Tornado warning for the county to our west. We began to monitor because if this storm was just developing, it could possibly make it into our area? 15 minutes later, the interruption happens again, and the storm was now headed our way. We began at that time to protect ourselves. We have a place to go if we have to, but we brought in the slides, lowered the jacks, and put everything away that could fly around. We were ready for a really bad wind.
Within 5 minutes we realized that the Tornado was going to go north of us in Lindale, where our children live, and where we have lived for the last 10 years. The storm was to arrive in 15 minutes. No one knew if the tornado was on the ground, we just assumed it was.
About that time we got word that our kids had left their car outside of their garage and they called to ask if we could go pull it inside? Jill asked me, and I said, sure! “The tv said it was still 15 minutes away. We can get there in time and move the car inside and ride the storm out in their home.” So off we went. Due North.
I could see the storm to our west as we approached Lindale. The storm sirens were blaring and the wind was climbing. We were going to time this just right. So I thought. We got to the I-20 crossover and traffic was backed up. No one was really paying attention to the sirens or so it appeared, and no one was moving. I was beginning to sweat. “Jill, we are about to be in trouble. Its almost pitch black out here and I can’t see to be able to get out of the way of this thing.” I immediately threw the X4 into sport mode and jumped on it as I went around the traffic and through the red light. I looked at Jill and said, “what are they going to do, stop me?” We both kind of laughed. By this time the electricity was going out around us, the rain was sideways and we both thought we were about to die. I was literally going 90 mph down a side road to get to Johnny and Jackie’s house. I actually slid past their road by 30 feet before I could stopp and began backing up. We tried to open the garage door as I pulled into the driveway but the electricity was off, so Jill ran around the house, found a key and finally made her way into the garage to get the door open. I pulled the kids’ car in and realized that mine was going to be trashed because they didn’t have enough room for both.
Jill grabbed a blanket and huddled in the corner of the hallway. I stayed in the garage for a period of time as I wanted to see it cross by or on us. 😉 Jill wasn’t happy with me at all, but I convinced her all was ok. I finally ran into the hallway at the height of the storm, but it essentially missed us by a block or two.
The wind started to die down, and the sirens subsided. I told Jill to hop in the car, I wanted to go see how much of the city had been destroyed. I didn’t think there was a city left actually, after this one. We got down the street and it started getting dark again. The sirens started blaring again and Jill was wanting to go back to the house. I could see the tornado. It was heading west northwest and we were not in danger, however it’s hard to explain that to a wife who just wants to take cover, so we bypassed the city and went around the current twister. Little did we know that literally 100 ft from where we were just 20 minutes earlier flying down the highway was where the twister touched down for the first time. It missed a majority of the city but totally destroyed 16 miles of Hwy 16. I mean everything in its path – trees, houses, cars, everything you can imagine. We had been spared. It was an EF 2 tornado and was 1 mile wide at its widest point.
IMG_0660 (click for video from inside the garage)
I have lived in Tyler, Texas since 1982. Jill and I got married in 1986, and neither of us have experienced much of a tornado on the ground here. We have had a few little ones in 30 years, but nothing like the 2 that hit this year in Lindale, Texas. The weather has been really strange. I guess it’s all that Global Warming. 