GULFNADO

As I'm sure you've heard by now, Gulf Wars was a little more natural-disaster-y than is usual.   From what we can gather, an EF-1 tornado touched down very near to site on the afternoon of Thursday, March 18th.  There have been rumors of a second one that afternoon in a different location (still near, but off site), but I don't know if that's been confirmed or not. What I can tell you for sure was that it was pretty damned scary.  This was my fifth tornado, although it's not exactly something you get used to, ever - and I've never been camping when it happened until last week. Microbursts, straightline winds, CTG lightning, falling trees, hail,  and flooding are even less fun when you're waiting out the storm in what amounts to a giant Ziploc baggie.

The back half of war was pretty much effectively canceled, and 3,000 people came together as one big family to help each other clean up, salvage, remove trash, feed each other, shelter each other, and just generally make sure everyone was okay.  There was a lot of chaos right after the storm - there was a bit of a meat-grinder of frightened, stampeding humans trying to GTFO for a while - but for the most part people took care of each other, and that was really wonderful to see.   Barring a few concussions and a couple of broken feet, I don't think we had any very serious injuries, and no one was lost or killed.  All of the animals - horses, hounds, falcons and birds, and all the pets and service animals - made it out just fine, thank goodness.

Up until then, war was SO much fun. I have pics of the ravine battle, the campsite, the feast, and a couple of other things that I'll share later as soon as I get organized and finish unpacking and doing laundry.  (By the way, my new tent held up like a champ!)  For now, though:

(Reportedly a photo of the actual storm that hit GWXXV from the local media,
though I have no idea if it really is. This is just what's going around Facebook).