We’ve spent most of the last month in ‘Tornado Alley’ – Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota – and we’ve heard lots of conversations about weather alert radios. We’re normally at our computers and on the Internet, so we use a website, my-cast.com to monitor weather. We really like that website, and we didn’t want to buy a radio. We also heard some of the drawbacks of the radio. Most require you to know the county you’re in … right – I’m lucky to know what state I’m in! And, you could get annoying, unrelated alerts in the middle of the night.
When we got to Minneapolis for the FMCA rally, we heard that Tornado warnings had happened just the night before and we got worried. Jim noticed that My-Cast had recently been purchased by Garmin and was offering a $4/mo service to send the weather alerts to your cell phone! Cool. Our cell phones are with us all the time. Now they vibrate and or ring anytime there is a weather alert in one of our specified areas.
Luckily, we didn’t get any tornado warnings while we were in Minneapolis. But, Jim also set it up to show reports about storms in Florida, where our family lives. Thus, the photo at the beginning of this post.
I sure hope we never experience a tornado in our RV. How do you protect yourself?
Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com