Unbelievable. I had a medical appointment in Washington today so my wife and I stayed at a hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland, last night. We got back from dinner at 6:30...no hint of any weather issues...but an hour later all hell broke loose.
It suddenly got dark, buckets of rain mixed with hail, thunder, lightning, a wild wind...the whole nine yards...and then repeated blaring alerts on our phones of a Tornado Warning...seek shelter. Internet service went out at that point.
So we're on the top (6th) floor of the hotel and I'm gawking out the big window. When my wife suggested we go to the 1st floor, I'm like, hell no, it'd be romantic to die in one another's arms.
Of course I was joking. The seriousness of the situation just wasn't registering. My brain is going: a
tornado??...in freakin'
Gaithersburg??...no way. Tornadoes don't happen in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It's probably an overreaction.
Only 15 minutes later everything was over, and I went downstairs to check on our car. All the hotel employees were gathered together in the lobby, and there were, like, 20 people in the parking lot taking videos with their phones of a large black cloud disappearing toward the east.
I asked one of them, was it a tornado? And he's like, uh, yes, as though I were the only doofus in the building who hadn't gotten the word.
This morning, as media reports flowed in regarding the event -- see link below -- I told my wife that my performance the previous evening might qualify me for a Darwin Award. She said, no, you have to die for that. But she suggested that I might be in the running for Clueless Dumbass of the Month at least. The girl is such a smart-aleck.
All in all, a memorable evening. And the damage and injuries, including one fatality, were no joke: