Last Updated: September 9, 2026
For nine years we left Florida in April and drove north. It was never a casual decision. April is when the country’s severe weather season is at its most violent across the Deep South, and we were crossing it in a house we had to tow. The worry came back every single spring, and it was the one part of the calendar we never fully solved.
We went anyway, and the reason was flowers. Leaving the Gulf coast in April and working slowly northwest meant traveling inside the spring itself — redbud and magnolia and fruit blossom in the southern states, then daffodils and tulips, then the woodland flowers coming up through last year’s leaves: bloodroot, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple. Keep moving north at the right pace and spring never ends. It takes four to six weeks to get from Florida to the Rockies at three hours of driving a day, which is how we traveled, and that put us into the mountains just as their spring was starting. Yellowstone’s RV parks open around the end of May. The Canadian parks open mid-May into June. It all lines up.
Here is the part we only understood properly much later. The thing that made the April departure worth it — the bloom moving north — is driven by exactly the same machinery that makes April dangerous. Warmth pushes north out of the Gulf, the jet stream follows it, and the boundary between the two is where both the wildflowers and the tornadoes are. We were not traveling near the severe weather season. We were traveling with it, at about the same speed, for six weeks, every year.
What follows is how we actually handled that, and everything else the sky did to us over nine years: wind, snow, cold, heat, hail and hurricane season. Some of it is what we got right. Some of it is just luck, and we should say so plainly at the start — in nine years we were never once in a situation where we had to take shelter from a tornado. That is not a technique. It is mostly the result of being unwilling to drive on days other people drove.
Those pouches are mammatus clouds, photographed from our site at West Glacier, Montana. They form on the underside of a thunderstorm’s anvil and they mean a severe storm is somewhere close — though, contrary to what you will often hear, they are not a sign that hail is falling where you are standing. The hail was the storm they belonged to, and it landed south of us: one to two inches, enough to wreck cars. We found that out when the rental we were given during a truck service turned out to be covered in hail dents. That whole stay is in our Glacier National Park waterfalls post.
Why We Always Left Florida in April
Spring moves north at roughly fifteen to twenty miles a day. That is a walking pace, and it is very close to the pace of an RV that only drives three hours at a time and then stops for three or four days to look at things. Traveling that way, you do not see spring once. You see it over and over, in one state after another, for six weeks.
The sequence was reliable. Redbud and magnolia and flowering fruit trees first, roadside, unavoidable, usually while we were still in the southern states. Then daffodils and tulips in town gardens further north — often, we later learned, marking the doorways of farmhouses that are no longer there. Then the real prize, which is the woodland flowers on the forest floor in the short window before the canopy closes over them and takes the light.
Bloodroot in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, trillium in the Missouri Ozarks at Eminence, ten days and four hundred miles apart, both at exactly the same stage. That is the whole argument for leaving in April, and it is a good one.
The other half of the argument is what waits at the far end. Getting into Yellowstone or Glacier at the end of May means snow is still a real possibility and some roads are shut — but it also means wildflowers at elevation, newborn animals, and campgrounds that are not yet full. Reaching the Canadian border by early June works the same way. Arriving on the cusp of a season is the single best trade in RV travel, and April is when you have to leave to make it.
Where the Tornadoes Actually Are, and When
The mental image most people carry is Kansas in May. That is real, but it is only one frame of a moving picture, and if you are driving north out of Florida in April you are in a different frame entirely.
The season migrates. Early in spring the warm, moist air that feeds severe storms is still bottled up near the Gulf, so April’s risk concentrates across the Deep South — Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, western Kentucky, the region often called Dixie Alley. April averages roughly 190 tornadoes nationally, and its outbreaks tend to be characterized less by number than by violence. By May the warmth and the jet stream have moved inland and north together, and the focus shifts to Oklahoma and Kansas; May is the busiest month of the year, averaging around 269. By June it has moved again, to the northern Plains and upper Midwest, at around 191. Then it keeps going into Canada.
Lay our route over that and the problem is obvious. April in the Southeast, May crossing the Plains, June in the northern Plains or on the Canadian border. We were not dodging the season. We were keeping pace with it. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center publishes the outlooks that show this in real time, and the day-one and day-two convective outlooks became part of our morning routine every spring.
Two other things are worth knowing. Dixie Alley storms are more likely to happen at night and are more often wrapped in rain, which means you may not see one coming. And Florida itself, where we spent every winter, has the highest tornado frequency per square mile of any state — though the great majority are weak, and the winter and early-spring ones tend to come with squall lines rather than out of a clear afternoon.
Then there is the number that matters most to anyone sleeping in a trailer. Since 1975, roughly one-third of all tornado deaths in the United States have occurred in mobile and manufactured homes. The National Weather Service puts it more starkly still: of tornado deaths that happen in homes, about 54 percent are in manufactured housing, and residents are 15 to 20 times more likely to be killed than someone in a permanent structure. The usual failure is the anchoring system. An RV is not a manufactured home, but it is closer to one than it is to a house — it is light, it has a lot of side area, and nothing holds it down at all. The official guidance for anyone in that kind of structure is not to shelter in place and not to wait for a warning. It is to leave for a solid building before the storm arrives, because once a warning is issued it may already be too dangerous to drive.
The Mayfield Scar
In April 2022 we were driving between Hardin and the lakes in western Kentucky and came on a corridor of snapped and twisted timber running away over the hills. It was four months old. What stayed with us was not the scale of it but the edge — how abruptly the destroyed ground stopped and ordinary woods began again, within a few yards.
That was the track of the tornado of December 10 and 11, 2021. It was on the ground for 165.7 miles, from just under nine in the evening until nearly midnight, up to 1.13 miles wide, rated EF4, and it killed 57 people. It struck the town of Mayfield at its worst. By the time it crossed Kentucky Lake and cut through Land Between the Lakes — where we were standing — it had come down to EF2, and EF2 is what took those trees.
The date is the part that should stop you. December. Not April, not May. Whatever seasonal rule you have built for yourself, that storm did not follow it, and it remains the deadliest December tornado event in United States history. Standing in the middle of it changed how seriously we took the spring drive. That stretch of Kentucky is covered properly in Cumberland Falls, Bowling Green and Hardin, and the whole state is in our Kentucky travel guide.
What We Actually Did About It
Less than you might expect, and more consistently than you might expect.
We checked the weather along the route every single day. The iPhone’s built-in app was the first look and it was never good enough — it will tell you it is going to rain, which is not the question. What we came to rely on was the LEX18 Storm Tracker app, from the NBC station in Lexington, Kentucky. That sounds parochial for people driving across the whole country, and the reason it works is not sentimental: local television weather apps are usually built around the warning polygons and the radar, which is what actually matters, while the big national apps are built around a forecast icon for a city you are not in. Any good local station’s app will do the same job. That one is simply the one we trusted.
Then we waited things out, repeatedly. Not dramatically — we would look at the next day’s route, decide it was not worth it, and stay put. In nine years we did that many times and it never once cost us anything except a day, because RV parks are almost universally reasonable about weather. If we wanted to add a night, they found us a night. If we needed to cancel one or two nights at a park sitting under a severe risk and go somewhere else instead, nobody argued. They live there, they watch the same radar, and they would rather you were not in their park during a storm either.
The one time we genuinely had to move was not a tornado at all. In February at Chokoloskee Island, Florida a storm brought a tidal surge large enough that the motorhome would have flooded where it sat. We evacuated overnight. That is the whole list — nine years, one evacuation, and it was water rather than wind.
The last thing, and probably the most important, is the least dramatic: we never drove marathon days. Three hours was a long day. That habit was adopted for entirely different reasons — we wanted to stop and look at things — but it turned out to be the best severe-weather policy we had. A three-hour drive is a decision you can cancel over breakfast. A ten-hour drive commits you to being somewhere in the middle of a state you cannot leave when the afternoon goes bad.
Wind Was the Everyday Problem
Tornadoes were the fear. Wind was the thing we actually dealt with, constantly, and the two rigs behaved completely differently.
With the Airstream we were comfortable towing in 30 to 40 mph crosswinds. That is entirely down to the hitch. We installed a ProPride specifically for wind, and it is not a conventional anti-sway bar — it uses a linkage that shifts the trailer’s effective pivot point forward, near the tow vehicle’s rear axle, so a gust that would normally start the trailer swinging has far less leverage to work with. It does not make wind pleasant. It makes it a matter of gripping the wheel rather than a matter of physics you cannot argue with.
The Newmar motorhome was the opposite, which surprises people, because it was enormously heavier. Weight is not the variable that matters — area is, and a big diesel coach is a very tall flat wall. We would not have driven the Newmar in crosswinds anywhere near 40 mph. We would sit in an RV park and wait, which we did many times.
Parked was not automatically safe either. The Newmar’s slide toppers — the fabric awnings over each slide-out — would catch the wind and flap hard enough that on a number of occasions we simply brought the slides in and lived in a narrower motorhome until it died down. Our week at the Newmar factory in Nappanee, Indiana in April 2020 was the full demonstration: snow on the second day, then torrential rain and gusts to 50 mph, slides in, everybody in the customer lounge.
Snow, and Why It Was Worse in the Motorhome
If you travel north in spring you will be snowed on. Not might — will. We were snowed on in Indiana in April, in New Mexico in May, at Yosemite in March, at Cedar Breaks in Utah, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, https://www.travelinghuntleys.com/2017/12/23/south-padre-island-texas/Edcouch, Texas and a couple of times running from Gardiner, Montana down to Denver. Cedar Breaks was the deepest we were ever in. The roads were slick rather than genuinely bad, and we got backed into the site without drama.
Again the two rigs split, and again not in the direction you would guess. The Newmar was poor in snow despite all that weight — getting into an icy park at Yosemite took a long, careful time, because a heavy rear-drive coach with most of its mass behind the drive axles will happily go sideways. The Airstream behind a four-wheel-drive truck was much better. The Gardiner-to-Denver snow did not slow us down at all.
Cold, as opposed to snow, went the other way. The Newmar was excellent in it: all-electric on shore power, heated floors, and a diesel generator that worked extremely well when there was no shore power. The Airstream heats with propane, and its tanks are small enough that hard use empties both in a few days. Our answer was to stop using the furnace. Two portable electric heaters, run off the shore power we almost always had, kept the trailer comfortable with outside temperatures of 12 to 18°F. That also keeps the propane for cooking and keeps the furnace from cycling all night, which is its own reward.
Heat, Rain and Hail
Heat was the bigger problem of the two extremes. The Newmar handled Arizona above 100°F, but its air conditioners ran more or less continuously to do it. The Airstream seemed to struggle harder in the same conditions, though with two air conditioners it still kept the inside genuinely comfortable. Neither rig failed us in heat. Both made it clear that above 100°F you are running a machine at its limit and you need reliable 50-amp power to do it.
Rain was almost never a travel problem, only an inconvenience — it slows you down and it makes setting up miserable, and that is about all. Hail was a different matter. Hail is one of the few things that can do serious, expensive damage to a parked RV in a few minutes, and there is nothing you can do about it once it starts. So we treated hail in the forecast the way we treated a severe thunderstorm risk: as a reason not to move, or a reason to move somewhere else. We were caught in small hail a number of times over nine years and never in the large stuff, which brings us back to those mammatus clouds at the top of this post and the hail-dented rental car we were handed in Montana.
Hurricanes we handled by not being there. We avoided Florida during hurricane season and traveled on the edges of it — November was normal for us, which is technically still inside the season and in practice is the quiet end of it.
Planning a Year Ahead
Almost none of this was decided in the moment. Routes were planned about a year in advance, and the planning was mostly weather research.
The main tool was historical monthly data — weather.com and similar sites will give you average temperatures and precipitation for a place by month, going back years. That answers the only question that matters at the planning stage, which is not “what will the weather be” but “what is this place normally like in the third week of May”. For anywhere we intended to hike, we also read recent trail reports, because in spring the binding constraint is not temperature, it is whether the trail is still under snow or has turned to mud.
Out of that came a working calendar that barely changed in nine years. Florida and the southern states from November through April. Arizona for the spring bloom, February to June. The Rockies and the Appalachians in spring or fall, catching them on the way north or the way back south. Canada June through August. California any time. And for the popular places — Yellowstone above all — deliberately the shoulders: late May, or late September into October. Fewer people, and you get either wildflowers and newborn animals or fall color and the rut. The cost is that you are accepting a real chance of snow at one end and an early storm at the other, which is the same trade this whole post is about.
Wind, snow, rain, tornadoes, tropical storms, extreme cold and extreme heat all fed into where we went and when. That sounds exhausting written down. In practice it was one spreadsheet a year and ten minutes with a radar app each morning, and it is the reason we have very little in the way of disaster stories to tell.
Weather Resources We Used
NOAA Storm Prediction Center — the day-one through day-three convective outlooks are the clearest picture available of where severe storms are likely, and they are issued and updated daily. This is the first thing to look at when planning a spring travel day: spc.noaa.gov. NOAA Weather Radio — a dedicated receiver with the alarm enabled will wake you when your phone will not, and it does not depend on cell coverage, which matters enormously in the places RVers camp: weather.gov/nwr. A local television station’s radar app — ours was LEX18 Storm Tracker out of Lexington, Kentucky, but any station app built around live radar and warning polygons will outperform a generic national forecast app. Your phone’s government alerts — Wireless Emergency Alerts for tornado warnings are on by default on most phones; check that nobody has turned them off. Historical monthly climate data — weather.com and NOAA’s climate normals for planning a route months ahead. Park and forest trail reports — for spring, when snowpack and mud decide what you can actually do.
Practical Tips for Traveling an RV Around the Weather
Find the shelter before you need it. This is the one thing to do on arrival, and it takes five minutes. Ask at the office which building is the storm shelter. Many parks have a designated one — a concrete block bathhouse, a laundry, a basement in the office. Many parks have nothing at all, and that is worth knowing on a clear afternoon rather than at two in the morning. A fabric-roofed pavilion is not a shelter. Neither is your rig.
Decide the night before, not the morning of. Look at the next day’s route against the Storm Prediction Center outlook before you go to bed. If it looks bad, cancel then. Parks are far more accommodating about a night added or dropped for weather than people expect — in nine years of doing exactly this, not one park gave us any difficulty.
Keep driving days short. Three hours was our maximum and it is the best severe-weather habit we ever fell into by accident. A short day can be abandoned over breakfast. A long day puts you in the middle of nowhere at exactly the hour the atmosphere destabilizes.
Do not judge crosswind by how heavy your rig is. Side area is what the wind acts on, not weight. Our motorhome was far worse in wind than a trailer weighing a fraction of it. Know your own rig’s limit and be honest about it, and if you tow, a hitch designed to move the pivot point forward is the single most useful piece of equipment you can buy for wind.
Bring the slides in when it blows. Slide toppers flap, tear, and take the topper rail with them. Retracting the slides costs you living space for a few hours and saves an expensive repair.
Carry electric heaters if you are in a trailer. Two small portable heaters on shore power will hold a trailer comfortable well below freezing and will not empty two propane tanks in three days. Keep the propane furnace for when the power goes out.
Treat hail in the forecast as a reason not to move. There is no defensive action once it starts, and an hour of large hail can cost you a roof, air conditioner shrouds and every window on one side. Change the day instead.
Plan the route from historical monthly data, not the ten-day forecast. A year out, all you can know is what a place is normally like in a given week — which is exactly enough to build a route. Then check trail reports closer to the date, because in spring the snowpack decides more than the temperature does.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it safe to travel in an RV during tornado season? It is manageable, but the honest answer is that an RV is one of the worst places to be in a tornado and no amount of preparation changes that. About a third of US tornado deaths since 1975 have been in mobile and manufactured homes, and National Weather Service guidance for anyone in that kind of structure is to leave for a solid building before the storm arrives rather than shelter in place. The practical approach is to avoid being in the path at all: watch the Storm Prediction Center outlooks, keep driving days short so plans can be canceled, and know where the nearest solid building is at every park you stay in.
When is tornado season in the United States? It moves. The peak is roughly March through June, but where it peaks changes month by month: April is the most dangerous month in the Deep South, May is the peak month nationally and centers on the southern Plains, and June shifts to the northern Plains and upper Midwest. Tornadoes can happen in any month — the deadliest December tornado event on record crossed western Kentucky on December 10, 2021.
What wind speed is too high to tow a travel trailer? There is no single number, because it depends on the rig, the hitch and the direction. We were comfortable towing our Airstream in 30 to 40 mph crosswinds with a ProPride hitch, and we would not have moved our much heavier motorhome in the same conditions. If you are new to towing, treat sustained crosswinds above about 25 mph as a reason to stay put, and gusts as more dangerous than sustained wind because they arrive without warning — most often when a truck passes or you come out from behind a cutting.
Will an RV park let you cancel because of weather? In our experience, almost always, and without argument. Parks would let us add a night when we wanted to sit something out, and let us drop a night or two when we wanted to be somewhere else. It is worth calling rather than canceling online, and worth doing it early in the day.
Should you leave your RV during a tornado warning? Yes, if there is anywhere solid to go and you can get there safely before the storm. The Weather Service is explicit that once a warning is issued it may already be too late to travel, which is why the decision needs to be made when the watch is issued, not the warning. Identify the destination on arrival at the park, not when the alert sounds. If there is genuinely nowhere to go, the last resort is a low-lying ditch or culvert away from vehicles and trees — but that is a last resort, not a plan.
How do you keep a travel trailer warm in freezing weather? Propane furnaces work but drink propane — two tanks can go in a few days of hard use. If you have shore power, two portable electric heaters will hold a trailer comfortable at 12 to 18°F and cost you nothing but a few amps. Keep the furnace in reserve for power outages, and remember that the furnace is also what keeps heat in the underbelly where the tanks and lines are, so in genuinely sustained cold you want it running at least intermittently.
What is the best month to leave Florida heading north in an RV? April, if you want to travel inside the spring — the bloom moves north at roughly the pace of a relaxed RV itinerary, and leaving in April puts you in the Rockies or at the Canadian border as their season opens. The trade is that April is the most violent month for severe weather across the states you will cross. May is calmer in the Southeast but puts you in the Plains at their peak, and pushes your arrival north later than the shoulder seasons we preferred.
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