Tuesday I got to see firsthand what it’s like to be a storm chaser… well kind of sort of.

Jason, Drew, and I hopped in the WAVY van and made our way to the peninsula to catch footage of a storm that Don and the other meteorologist were tracking. The tropical storm was supposed to be pretty bad and was expected to possibly lead for the 5pm show.

We drove, waited in traffic, moved up a tiny bit… and waited in more traffic. By the time we finally made it to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the skies were grey and it was pouring down. But the rain didn’t last long. By the time we were out of the tunnel the storm had come and gone.  Now this left us with a challenge, what was our story now?

We had a solution; we would find “storm damage.” Problem number two, other than a few broken branches and tree limbs, there wasn’t any damage. We rode around for hours and hours looking for a tree on a house, a car, or something.

Finally we were given the two addresses, one in Newport News and one in a small city by the name of Poquoson. Huge trees had fallen down at both of these locations. One fell in the street and the other on an old truck. We got our story, finally.

We still couldn’t leave the peninsula just yet. We parked the truck in a parking lot next to Wendy’s (and got some good food while we were there). Jason prepared his script, Drew put together the package and we prepared to go live at 10pm.

While we waited we were, approached by women asking about a car accident, harassed by kids wanting to be on TV, and unfortunately we even got mooned by teens in a passing car.

At the end of the day everything came together, we got home safely, and I even got to do my first stand up