I鈥檝e been hooked on tornadoes since I was a kid. I used to dream I was lying in my backyard as a black funnel cloud passed silently鈥攁nd safely鈥攐ver me. A shrink later told me the dream represented 鈥渟afe danger,鈥� but I never understood half of what he said, including that. As I grew older, I became a climate dilettante. I read about global warming and the coming ice age, wondered why barometric pressure affected dogs, and drew cloud charts in my daily planner. I saw Twister,听of course. And I kept having that dream.

I wanted to see a real storm听for myself, but there was the business of finishing grad school and raising kids. So I back-burnered tornadoes听for decades and nearly forgot about them. Then,听last winter, I saw a blurb in a travel magazine about stormchasing tours. I thought only Hollywood actors or meteorology nerds were allowed to chase tornadoes. But for $2,300 a week, I could, too. I justified it to my听now adult children, saying that if I died, at least it would be while doing something incredibly cool.

And I did. Not die鈥攄o something cool.听

I decided to book the听Mayhem 1 tour with , one of some 20 stormchasing outfits in the country, which听promises a 90 percent chance of seeing a tornado over the course of six days. Not only听was the company vetted by the review site听, it had fewer people per van听and was relatively affordable compared with听others (many run听$2,500 and up). All听trips are based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the epicenter of Tornado Alley, a swath of land that runs from central Texas to South Dakota and听spawns many of the approximately 1,200 events each year.

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