I always knew that it would happen eventually, Tonight it did. Tonight we had our first Severe Thunder storm in our camper. We got about an hour of solid downpour and about twenty minutes of pea sized hail. Let me tell you what though, that pea sized hail, sounded a whole lot bigger on the roof of our camper. 

We have like that next three or four months planned out on when we will be camping. Basically we will be doing just shy of three weeks in our camper and about nine days at home for the forseeable future. So canceling our plans is not really in the cards. Granted we could if we wanted to but honestly what is the point?

Weather Forcast

We are planning to live in our RV full time as soon as we are able to sell our house. At that point, we wont have the option to cancel our camping plans, because then it will be living plans. Also, I am still working full time so where we camp has to be with in a reasonable distance from my work. We really cant say, “Well it looks like it is going to rain for the next four days, lets go stay at a different campground.” That campground might be more than an hour drive to my work and I really dont want to drive that far for my job.

This is what the ten day forcast looked like on the day before we went camping…

The first day we were here, IT WAS HOT!! It made it up to about 95 with about 50% humidity on May 5th! About 5pm, the rain came in. It wasn’t really a storm, just a good steady rain. That was on Friday. 

On Saturday, it showed a chance of rain again, and as I looked at an updated on Saturday morning, the forcast had changed to this…

Through out the day, I kept checking on the radar looking for when the rain would hit. It started out being forcast to hit about 4pm, then it got moved back to 6pm, then to 8pm and finally around 10pm. 

It Has Arrived!

This time the metorologists finally got the prediction right because it started raining…and raining…and raining some more. Then the pinging started, and got more and more frequent until it seemed to be hailing more than it was raining. 

There is a open air pavilion at the camp ground that we are staying at and people often take their vehicles down to it when a severe storms moves in. About the time that the hail started was about the time that I started to see headlights come on and people moving their vehicles down. My thoughts though, even if I was to move my truck it would still get hit and even though the pings we were hearing sounded like golf balls, it was only about pea sized. So why get out and get soaking wet and more than likely get stuck in my truck for a couple hours or even sleep in it and leave my wife with our kids. 

She was scared enough as it was with me being here to comfort her, I cant imagine what she wouldve felt if I wasnt. No vehicle is worth that. 

The Icing On The Cake

About ten minutes into the rain, the power went out! That meant only a few lights, no fans, and of course, no A/C! As I am writing this at about midnight, it has dropped down to 64 degrees, thank goodness, but when the power went out, it was still in the 80’s! So it has gotten a little warm in here and a little stagnat as well with no air moving. 

Thankfully we are in the county that I work for, so I know where to look to find information. I know who the power company is here. The average person here, wont know that kind of stuff. So they are basically just left in the dark in more ways than one. I know that I can pull up a website and see the area affected by the outage, how many people are without power, the status of repairs and en ETA of when it will be back up. Unfortunately, as I am writing this about midnight, the ETA for repair is about 2:45AM. 

Bless all the electrical workers that go out in these storms and work with electricity to get peoples power back on. If it was me, no way I would be out in pouring rain working on eletrical lines. So thank you to all those linemen and women out there that are willing and very capable of doing just that!

Round One

We have had two rounds of storms come through already tonight, after the first one went through, my wife and I went outside to survey our vehicles and the stuff we had up outside. Things like our grill, chairs and our octogol screened collapsable gazebo. Thankfully there was any damages that we could find, however, the gazebo was collapsed, and thankfully one of the support straps was attached to a fence, otherwise who knows where it wouldve ended up. 

We got the tent set back up and got it staked down, hopefully a little better and gathered all the chairs that were under it and any other loose items that were now scattered all over our camp site. We got everything layed down and put up next to our camper so when the next storm hit, at least they wouldnt be just sitting in the middle of the yard. It really surprised me though because even though, the tent was callasped and flung over about ten feet, the chairs were still sitting in the same spot that we left them an hour or so before. 

On one hand, I fell like we did the right thing by setting the tent back up, putting some corkscrew stakes in the gound to anchor it with and retightening everything. On the other hand though, I think maybe we shouldve just taken it down and stuck it in the pass through of the trailer. We also have the side covers on our gazebo tent so, I also wonder, if those werent on it, would it have allowed enough air to pass through that it wouldnt have collapsed? 

Round Two

After the first round ended and we got the yard picked up and all of our things gathered, round two hit. Thankfully the second wave was nowhere near as big or as powerful as the first wave. I only hear a handful of hail pings and the rain was not as bad as the first wave. 

Our gazebo made made it through the second wave of the storm with only one side collapsing, but it is still standing. We have one more wave to go through before this system passes and we are in the clear. 

Halleluh! 

The power just came back on! It scared the crap out of me when the A/C kicked back on but that is one scare that I will gladly take!  

I don’t know what the rest of the night wil have in store for us. The radar prediction shows that there might be another line of storms move through about 3am, but I’m not sure I trust it. The first wave that came though, the radar prediction showed to be about half the size that it turned out to be. The second and third wave of storms, it didn’t even have.

Now we are winding down on the third wave of storms, the power is back on, and the tent outside, is still somewhat standing. So I think that I am going to go and try and get some sleep and tomorrow, I will continue this with what we found out in the day light

The Next Day

Our kids slept through the whole night with the exception of a bathroom break. They were totally oblivious to everything that happened. Honestly, thank goodness for that. The bad part about it is that they woke up at about 7 am, honestly a little early for going to sleep at 2am but up we got. 

Everything was soaking wet and dirty with leaves and twigs and dirt! We put everything out in the sun to dry off and straighten out and made sure our gazebo tent was staked down well. Overall, it held up really well and only collapsed the first time. The second and third time only the side that we didn’t have staked down collapsed but the tent as a whole stayed up and anchored. 

There was a shoe deep puddle outside our front door but by late afternoon it was pretty well dried up. All in all, everything made it through okay. 

Something We Have To Get Use To

Storms are something we are going to have to get use to, honestly. Once we are able to sell our house and we live in an RV full time, we won’t have the option to go anywhere else when a storm is predicted to come through because of my job. Once I’m able to retire, then that might be a different story, but until then, we just have to live through it. 

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Until it’s time to hitch up the camper again,

Happy Camping!

NOTE: This post was originally posted earlier this year(2023) when we first started our blog. I am reposting all of our old posts to get caught up to the present and then I will start writing new ones.