Into the sunset...

Chase Day 2

We were up and ready to leave the hotel at 8:30. I could have done with 3 hours more sleep, but as expected I had now adjusted to US time so I’ll take that. I had to put up with Liam’s constant whinging about his “flu” (“put in your blog about how ill I am”) and some outrageous accusations of me keeping him awake by snoring “like a pneumatic drill” all night. As if!

We had some breakfast at ihop and got into the usual debate of how you can possibly have pancakes and maple syrup on the same plate as bacon and eggs. It’s wrong on any level you care to mention!

I swigged some Gaviscon and we headed to Wall-mart for provisions and then to a local mall to buy some souvenirs. I called home using Skype while drinking a chocolate banana smoothie. Weather back home was cold, wet and windy (still which is a shame) and the kids’ cricket was off yet again. Skype was behaving itself for a change and I had an uninterrupted call. One thing that has been sorted out is the coverage of my Orange mobile which had been pitiful on previous trips – I now had a constant signal. Or perhaps it was just Texas having never chased here before.

I like Texas and I’d hoped to be chasing here as storms tend to initiate further south earlier in the season so I’m delighted to be in new territory. The rest of the week looks very promising with potential for us to be much further north east than here in Missouri or Iowa but that remains to be seen; draw a line from Oklahoma City to Yankton, South Dakota and I’ve never been east of that line, my own personal asymptote. Hopefully that will change on this trip but one thing I’ve learnt about storm chasing is nothing is certain. Far from it.

With the forecast not dissimilar to yesterday we headed to a local park for a picnic before setting off east. It looks like a “wait and see how and where things develop day” with a 5% tornado chance in our general area north into western Oklahoma and south west Kansas

We drive north on US 70 to Plainview. It's 16:00 and a tower is going up in front of us.We wait around in Plainview for a while next to Ace Bail Bonds while we decide what to do. We retrace our steps down US 70 towards a cell with a clear over shooting top to our south. The tower is looking good and we stop to take some photos. Camille and Anne contrive to sink into the mud which predictably now lines the back of the SUV where Liam and I will take residence tomorrow...

We continue south and drive through torrential rain and hail which also generates a nice rainbow. We track the storm south and take shelter in Jayton where we take shelter expecting the hail core to pass over us. As it happens is passes to the south and we miss out on the expected 3 inch hail thoug we see some decent anvil crawler bolts of lightning.

We head Norh on US 83 towards Childress and the Comfort Inn for the night. En route we stop to take photos of a spectacular sunset.

Tomorrow looks like being north east of here in Nebraska, but we'll wait and see.

More photos to upload as it's now midnight and the uploader is not working...

Total miles: 316