Day 8 – “Bzzzzzzz, This is the Emergency Broadcast System”…


Usually when we hear that on the radio, it is followed by, “... this is only a test…” Well, in this case it was no test of the system! It was an actual warning of an impending severe thunderstorm. While a short distance east of Bismark, North Dakota, we heard this warning while we were set up in an RV park just off the freeway.

We had been watching dark clouds building behind us as we traveled. Now that we stopped, they were getting closer. Before long lightning started to flash in the distance, and then came rain. At first, there were just some sprinkles that sent us inside the camper, but then the drops got bigger. Eventually, there were torrential rain sheets blowing sideways while lightning flashed all around us.

By the time we heard the warning on the radio, the camper was rocking in the wind gusts. We don’t usually put the jacks down on the camper, but in this case, it would have been nice to have the extra stability.

Thankfully, the RV park had a protective row of trees on both the north and south sides of the park and they blocked quite a bit of the wind which was coming from the southwest. Still, for several hours the camper swayed and rocked with each new gust of wind. I had pulled up a radar for the storm on my phone, so we could watch the bands as they went through the area. It was pretty accurate, so we could tell when the worst of the storm had passed. That helped reassure me that it would be ok to catch some sleep when we got too tired to stay up watching the storm blowing outside the window. 

(The video shows one of the lightning flashes, but it is right at the end of the clip)


A few more loud thunder claps sounded after we crawled under the covers, but it didn’t take too long to drift off to sleep with rain pattering on the roof. Just rain, which us Washingtonians are used to.


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