“A tornado just touched down in Gaylord”

Before I got back on the highway to go home, I stopped at this little gift shop thing. Because my mom used to have an Indian River snow globe, but my cat broke it. So I was looking for another snow globe, didn’t find it, just started going home. Anyway, so after that I was starting to head home and I got off the highway in Gaylord and when I got off the highway like there was a lot of traffic and I like couldn’t exactly figure out what was going on. But I tried to go to Starbucks and the Starbucks was closed. And so I- I was on the phone with my boyfriend at the time, and he was like, “Well, is there a Biggby?” And I was looking, I’m like, “I think that’s closed too,” but then I got up to an intersection and I saw that the lights weren’t working. So I said, “Oh, there must be a power outage.” And I made a u-turn, and I like started to go back and there were sirens everywhere, and I thought that like, “Oh, it must be like the cops are getting to the intersections to a direct traffic.” So, anyway, I got back on the highway, and my boyfriend had just kind of been, like, I guess, absent-mindedly like scrolling Facebook or like, scrolling the news or something. All of a sudden he goes, “Oh my God!” I’m like “What?” He’s like, “A tornado just touched down in Gaylord.” So, it turns out that I missed the tornado by like 20 minutes. Like, if I had been in that area, 20 minutes earlier, like I could’ve been in the middle of the tornado. And it was really serious. It was like an F3 I think. I read there were two fatalities and like 60 some injured. Entire buildings are gone, cars are smashed. It was just, it was unbelievable like, the amount of damage there was. So I was really fortunate that – I think maybe my grandma might have been trying to steer me into the souvenir shop just to keep me away from the tornado. And I know, like some people might not believe that that’s true, but I think I do.

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