You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. And we continue here on Our American Stories, and next we bring you the story of Martin Licious and his company, Tempest Tours, an unconventional Texas-based tour company. I first became interested in severe weather growing up in North Texas where we have big storms on a regular basis.
When I was a kid, probably about four or five years old, we would have storms that come through that the lightning would hit so close to our house that our whole house would shake. Also, right down the street from our house was a TV station called WBAP-TV. Harold Taft was the meteorologist on staff, and Harold is actually credited with creating the American weather cast, TV weather cast. Before him, they would simply read the text.
They would read the forecast off a piece of paper, and then he, being a full-blown meteorologist, decided to use maps to describe to the viewers what was happening. Believe me, we're going to. The computer will paint this on. Kind of fun to watch it, so let's just do that for a second.
See, all the color comes on, all the symbols. All right, still getting a little light freezing drizzle up here in Gage, Oklahoma. So I'd watch him a lot, and they had this old-fashioned black and white radar, and he'd show that quite a bit as well. And I think that was kind of when I really became interested in weather. And then when I was about 12 years old, I asked my mom if I could build a weather station on top of our house.
She said, sure, just be careful. And I started plotting storms as they came through on a map, and I entered a science fair and won the competition. I built a 3D model of a supercell thunderstorm. Eventually, I got a car and decided that I'd go out and film storms. And then about the same time that I did that, I heard that there were these guys called storm chasers, and I met some of them.
And then from there, that point on, I did it quite a bit. Eventually, for Tempest Tours, that came about in, we started it in 2000. I'd say around 1999, I decided I was going to do it because I didn't think that, I didn't say to myself, let's start a storm chasing tour company. I just was receiving a lot of requests from regular, normal people to go storm chasing with me. And they were usually not able to go because of work. So I thought, what if we created tours, and then we put out the schedule a year in advance, people could get off work and actually go.
And that's when Tempest Tours was born back around 2000. You know, storm chasing is kind of like fishing. You know, there's a good time of year to go fishing, right? But you go out and you go out several days fishing and some days are good and some days are not good.
So it's a lot like that. On a tour, you know, they're typically run four to 11 days a length. And of course, the longer the tour, the greater chance of seeing good storms, just like if you went on an 11 day fishing trip versus a four day fishing trip. Basically, they get up in the morning, we tell the guests when to meet us.
We stay at motels, of course. And we'll meet in the lobby or somewhere and we'll do a little weather briefing and tell them what we, we show the maps and so forth. And we tell them why we're going there, what we can expect that day. Then we all load up, head to that target, wait for storms to develop. And then we track the one that we feel has the greatest potential of producing a tornado or just being a really good supercell. And, you know, sometimes you'll have three or four storms form in your target area and you have to be very careful to pick the right one. And so we kind of sometimes hold back a little bit and wait until the best one what we think will be the best one to form.
And we've been very successful at that. And then we track it and if it's not moving too fast, we're able to stop several times and take pictures of it, including tornadoes and lightning and so forth, which you can see at our website. You know, people, a common question that people ask is how close do we get? And I say close enough to take great pictures, but far enough to be safe. So the best way to see how close we get is to go to our website or go to our Facebook page and just see the pictures that we've taken and some of our guests have taken.
And you can get a good idea of how close we get. Now, while they're in the van, along the way, there are there's a screen in the van. And so they're watching what the tour director is doing and they're seeing, you know, the models develop.
That's Kim George, Tempest Tour's customer relations manager. So he will be explaining those along the way, saying this is what the storm is doing. This is where we need to be. And so he will constantly keep them updated as they are going towards the target. And so they will wait. But when they actually get to visually see the storm, you know, coming up in the foreground, everybody gets very excited. So we get closer to the storm.
We track it. Sometimes you have to wait a little while. But most of the time you're going straight towards the storm. Most storms develop in the afternoon. And once you are on the storm, then depending on how the storm is moving, you position and you reposition and you reposition again because storms don't stand still most of the time. When we're chasing a storm, we follow it till it's the end or till you lose the light.
And sometimes that'll happen. And if you can't chase it when it's dark, sometimes they do. It depends on the storm. If it's developing tornadoes, sometimes we have, we did this past year, chase a storm even after dark. And they actually saw some nighttime tornadoes, which was very good for the group. They thought that was amazing. And the only reason you can see them is because of the lightning.
When it strikes, you can actually see the tornadoes below the storm. So that's basically a typical day. And then we get lodging nearby and they stay somewhere for the night.
And then they also are developing a plan to, you know, begin that all over again the next day. We are not a luxury tour company. We have to tell them that honestly, you know, when you're out chasing and anybody who does it would know, you'll be in Podunkies, America somewhere. And there's not a lot of options when it comes to places to stay. And sometimes there's not an option of places to eat. And so you do the best you can with the environment that you're in. And we are very good about finding places that you can stay. But every once in a while, you know, that Motel 6, it may be the only place that you can stay for the night.
So you do. Because the important thing is not the luxury of what we do, it's the chasing itself. And our guests do realize that, that you can't always be in, you know, a really swanky hotel.
But that's not why you go chase with us. You just need a bed, you need a place to get some rest, and then you can start the next day fresh. On a down day, we will head towards the next day's target.
So a down day may be followed by a severe weather potential day. So we'll head towards that target. And on the way stop at places that are interesting. Things that, you know, I've seen since I've been with a company that I never knew existed. There is a place in Kansas that's called Monument Rock. And it's just this sandstone formation in the middle of nowhere. And you go on it and it's just crazy.
It could be the Badlands in South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, Devil's Tower, Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. Or you might stop at a weather service office and take a tour. So we're always doing something interesting every single day. We know this is our guests' vacation time.
They want to see something interesting. We try to make it special when we're not on a storm. I mean, they're all coming for the storms. I mean, they don't really care about the other ones if they have a storm to follow. So, but yeah, we try to make the times that we're not, you know, in a hard chase for the storm.
We try to make those times as memorable as we can. And you are listening to Martin Licious and Kim George. And Martin is the founder of Tempest Tours. And Kim works there in the customer relations department. And tempestours.com is the website address tempestours.com. And go on there and take a look at the gallery section. So again, Martin Licious with Tempest Tours, his story, and so many Americans who are just fascinated by, well, just turbulence and tough weather.
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