tornado's and birthday's and road trips, oh my!

the title pretty much sums up last week for ya. but let me go back to last friday (april 15th) first.

my sweet friend mindy invited us to share her timeshare in orlando with her for the week of spring break so we did! we decided to leave on saturday morning at 8. but then mindy let me know that she was all ready and we could even leave at 7 if we wanted to get there earlier. the only problem was that i am a losssser and wasn't ready. maybe someday i'll be cool and have everything all packed and ready to go by the time my hubs gets home from work, but no time soon.

anyhow, so friday night found me up until 2am loading up the car and then waking up saturday morning (matty-matt's birthday!) at 6 to attach the thule (cargo carrier) and then reload the car because the stroller didn't fit in the thule. ugh! to make a long story short, we finally met up with mindy-minds and her gang at 9 and we were on our way!

we decided to stay in hilton head, south carolina that night. the total drive down to orlando is about 16 hours, so we planned 9 1/2 that first day and then beach time and the rest of the drive for the next day. but you know what they say about the best laid plans, right???

here we are, early in the day. the sky was grey and it rained off and on all day, but we didn't think anything of it.

happy birthday boy, driving his big rig of girls.

(bubba had to go to texas. :( )

babies got to travel in their jammie-jams for the first half of the day.

i had 3 bags at my feet. my purse, a food bag for everyone, and a bag of things to do for babies. as soon as there was noise back there, i handed something else back. not the most comfortable for me, but it works.

still happy, now wearing the ginormous "it's my birthday" button. still rainy, yucky weather.

we went to subway for lunch because i (as well as half of virginia) had heard that it was customer appreciation day and it was buy one footlong, get one free. that took forever and was really hardly worth the hassle, and you know i never say that about free stuff! here i am walking into subway with a winnie the pooh 1st birthday party hat on. hey, it was all i could find.

there's matt holding addie, mindy, ben, jack, and lexi's friend sydney.

on-the-road-birthday-celebrations.

big girls ducking from pictures. never gets old, right??

still happy.

there were tons of people on the road, so we'd drive for 30 minutes, then be in stop-and-go traffic for 30 minutes. ugh!

ha ha, got her.

and her.

north carolina has cute wild flowers planted all over so i tried (unsuccessfully) to get pictures.

 then around 4:20, the craziness happened. mindy called and asked if we were listening to the radio and if we had heard about all the tornado warnings going on. now, we are no stranger to tornado warnings, so at first we didn't think anything of it. but then she said they were predicting a tornado in benton, nc in 6 minutes. we were 6 miles from benton, nc when she heard this. we also hadn't been listening to the radio because we finally broke down and bought one of those new-fangeled dvd players for our car and we were happily watching "tangled." anyways, mindy says she's gonna pull over under the overpass and wait it out, but we could see blue sky and sunshine just a ways up ahead of us, so we thought we should keep going.

then we looked to our left and matt says, "oh, there's the tornado right there."

and there it was. and there we were. in stopped traffic on i-95.

we were almost to the blue sky, sunny day though, so we kept going as best we could. we passed one more overpass and as soon as we came out of that, the hail started. i've been in the car during hailstorms before and it never sounds pretty. it was so loud! there were golf ball size hail falling and within 10 seconds we couldn't see anything.  i was just waiting for that monstrous tornado, the one that  i knew was so close to us, to come and carry us away. or rattle our car or something. addie covered her ears but didn't cry. i think she even said "be quiet." frankie was calm and didn't cry. alexis and sydney in the backseat seemed like they were watching me to see what my reaction would be, to see how they should react. so even though i wanted to cry, i didn't. i whispered to matt that i was scared (over and over again) and we prayed. and he kept promising me that we were okay and we were going to be okay. i wasn't only worried about us, i was worried about mindy, behind us, the only adult in the car. ugh, it seemed like the hail lasted forever! and there we were, stranded in the middle of the freeway, like sitting ducks. finally, after about 5 minutes it stopped. people pulled back onto the freeway and drove away fast, i think we all had the same idea, let's get the heck out of here!

there was still a ton of traffic and everyone was still on edge. one tornado had already crossed over 1-95, and we all knew another one could do the same. all the radio stations had switched to emergency programming. i had my big road atlas on my lap and was circling counties and cities with damage or tornados on the way. i got ahold of mindy. she was crying and shaken up. when the hail started, she flipped around on the freeway and went back under the overpass. she apologized, but i was glad she had made it out of the hail. brytana (her 18 year-old step-daughter) had gotten all the kids away from the windows and protecting their heads. i hadn't even thought of that, i thought it was best to stay seatbelted, but who really knows?! mindy said she was sure we were all gonna die and just kept praying (loudly) over and over. it was pretty horrific.

we pulled over at a gas station with no electricity. the lady there said the tornado had gone right over them and that she and a family had locked the door to the station and locked themselves in a freezer. she was worried because her kids and mother-in-law were in a manufactured home that was now in the path of the tornado. everyone in the store was talking about where they were and what they saw. people with internet phones were checking to see what was going on. i had my big atlas and a bunch of people looked on it to see where the storms were and if the roads were clear. after about 30 minutes there, we decided we were okay to get back on the road.

it was crazy how much destruction we could see just from the freeway.

*damaged billboard

it looked like the trees were snapped in half..

there were tons of electric lines down.

look at all those trees, just snapped in half. we couldn't see any other damage, but from all the emergency vehicles in this picture, i'm sure there was some.

the home in the bottom right of this picture had the roof torn off.

we said many, many prayers of thangsgiving that we were all okay. and many, many prayers for all those that lost their lives and homes. 270 tornados ripped through the central states and 45 people died, 22 in north carolina alone. they called it "the perfect storm," the "worst string of tornados we've had in decades," and "the deadliest storm in years."

we listened to the radio and i circled counties for the next hour or two. the traffic was horrible and we were all on edge. but it was still matt's birthday and we had some celebrating to do! so later that night we stopped where every 42 year old in the world hopes to celebrate their birthdays, mcdonalds!

we wore our hats and sang happy birthday when he came back from washing up. he even ate an apple pie and ice cream cone.

*shy girl, singing for daddy.

our sweet set-up at the mc-e-dees.

it definitely wasn't the nice birthday dinner we had planned for matt, but that's just how our day went. we didn't roll up into our hotel room until 11:30 that night. poor mindy was so shaken still that when we put gas that night, she got sick. matt drove her car the rest of the way and she rode with me. i just kept thinking, what if we would have left at 7, where would we have been? or if we hadn't stopped at subway and taken forever. or if we hadn't taken so long picking up brytana in virginia. what if, what if, what if. it could have been much, much worse, and i am so thankful that we are all okay. and now i can say i've been through a tornado, and that's pretty cool. and reeeeally, i don't know which was scarier, the tornado, or the 16 hour car-ride with 4 kids. ;)