I’m sure everyone some point have been camping before. Camping is fun, you get to go fishing, swimming, have a campfire, and of course marshmallows. Most of my camping experiences went well, except one camping trip that was located in Nashua, Which is located in Northern Iowa. It was May 25th of 2008 and it was pretty much a nice day throughout the day. I was camping with my grandparents and I was only about 13 years old at the time.
It was around lunch time and it was our 2nd day camping in Nashua. After lunch ended, my grandpa and I went to go fishing down by the river, it got really cloudy once we got done fishing. Once we made it back to the camper, it started to rain a little bit. It rained for at least 30 min and then stopped raining for little bit. I went to go check outside and there was still dark clouds outside. Right after I went back in the camper, winds started picking up and somebody knocked on the camper and told us, their was a tornado on the ground just couple miles away from the campsite. I still remember that moment and at first when the man said that, I was not really thinking it was not that bad of tornado of some sort.
I was only 13 years old and I had never seen a tornado in front of me in my whole life, but once we left our camper, it was raining really good and the hail was so bad that it did some damage on the cars that were parked. Once we arrived at the shelter, from the corner of my eye I saw a dark cloud that was touching the ground about couple miles away in a corn field. I couldn’t believe I saw tornado that big, and this was the first tornado I had seen in person and all I thought was we were all gonna die in the shelter. Thank god that the person told us about this storm or we would of never known since their was no sirens at all on the camp ground. After the storm ended, there was branch's and limbs all over the campsite and their was tons of golf ball size hail all over the ground. The one good thing is the tornado missed the campsite, but that night we heard from the radio that the tornado was on the top scale which was a F5 tornado. This tornado did a lot damage to Dunkerton, Parkersburg, and parts of Oelwein. That night was a nightmare and I will never forget about it, I'm just glad to be alive today, you just never know what mother nature brings to you.
