| Now that things are back to what passes for normal around here I thought I would type up an account of our events on Sunday as best as I can remember. After that I hope to add some pictures Tracey took while I was driving us home. I am doing this mostly to record the events for future reference as it isn’t all that exciting compared to the scope of events in Pekin and Washington.
Our weather adventures started at around 10:30 Sunday morning as we arrived at the Hometown Buffet in Peoria for breakfast. The skies were ugly and we managed to get into the buffet between rain squalls that were very windy. At 10:51 a.m. I received a tornado warning on my phone with an ugly alert sound.
Tracey’s phone didn’t do anything and we quickly figured out that it was because her GPS was activated on her phone and mine wasn’t —— so I got the alarm because my phone thought I was still at home and her’s didn’t because it knew she was in Peoria. We finished our breakfast but were getting more nervous as the storm continued to get worse. I distinctly remember a woman sitting next us saying we didn’t have to worry about a tornado because it was too late in the year and “we couldn’t have a tornado this time of the year”. Our first premonition.
We went to Petsmart and Tracey ran in to get Louie some dog food while I waited out in the car. The storm really got bad then. It was just a bit past 11:00 a.m. There was small hail, high winds and enormous rain. Our car got banged by one of the many shopping carts sailing across the parking lot. (plastic cart, no damage to the car) We then started the very nervous drive back home.
Our first indication of the storms was the damage we came across on Pinecrest in E. Peoria. The road was down to one lane with a large tree across the road. There was a power line down on the east side of the road and lots of damage to trees and houses. Part of the storage business on the west side of the road was torn to pieces. The time stamp on these pictures start at 11:36 a.m.
Once we got past that damage we headed immediately to check on Mom at her trailer in Oak Lawn Mobile Estates in Morton. Also during this time we were getting text messages from my brother Alan that they had heard of the tornado activity too so we told him we would check on his house too. Mom was OK but there was no power and she was on the liquid oxygen tank. It was getting low so we called the medical supply place and they agreed they would bring her out a new tank. We then went over to Alan’s house and there was no damage there or any around their area. We heard there was damage in E. Peoria near the UAW hall so I thought we should go check on that and as we were driving through Groveland we could see the skies were very dark to the north where we were heading. By the time we got near E. Peoria we started seeing flashing red and blue lights at the intersection of Mueller and Springfield so we turned around. There was no sense in being part of the problem by getting into a traffic jam there.
The rain and wind really picked up on our way back toward home and as we were driving south back through Groveland a small dead tree blew over into the road right in front of us. I locked up the brakes and just barely avoided getting hit by the falling tree and almost ran into it. We were fortunate the car behind us was paying attention because they could have rear ended us and didn’t.
We made it safely home after getting around the tree in the road. The only real damage in our area was a tree down in our neighbors yard.
We realized our power was off when the garage door wouldn’t open. I had to push the button a few times before I figured that out. Doh! | 
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