I'll add the text tomorrow as it's now 2:00 a..m. and we've just has a severe storm over run our hotel with an amazing lightening and thunder show after what we'd just about given upo as a cap bust.
The first moderate risk of the trip today with a 5% risk of tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa.
We start with the usual trip to Wall-mart and I decided to
splash out on some sober new shorts and a couple of t-shirts. If you think the shorts/t-shirt
combos in the first couple of days were a bit “way out” the remaining options
in the suitcase were really untenable; just not gratuitously funny enough to
warrant an airing…
My guts were still complaining but more in a “you can’t make
an omelette without breaking eggs sort of a way”..,
We headed for St. Paul and chilled out in the sun for an
hour or so before heading east on US 92 where we stopped to photograph some
decaying, abandoned barns complete with improvised cold store-cum-tornado shelter.
There was also a field with some friendly horses that turned their noses up at
the offer of Peter’s baby organic carrots. I guess they normally eat fast food.
On getting back in the van I thought I’d check myself for
ticks and to my shock, one of the little bastards was trying to bury itself
into my right calf! I managed to pull it off and fortunately it didn’t look
like it had yet broken the skin. As much as I tried to kill it, it crawled
around like it was having a day at the beach. Bloody indestructible. Ticks are things to be wary of – they can
give you Lyme Disease which will really spoil your day, potentially
permanently. At the next opportunity we all jumped out of the SUV, started
stripping off and checking each other like a troop of baboons creating a social hierarchy. God knows what
any locals watching would have thought.
Jock found one crawling up his leg looking for a tasty lunch. As I write
this up (the next day) Anne has just found another of the little blighters on
her shoulder while sat I the van…
We stopped for a picnic at a lovely little town called
Osceola and sat on the well kept lawn of the county courthouse under a tree
while watching a squirrel and a bird play with each other, or so it seamed. We
got talking to the husband and wife team who are the building’s
superintendents. Last year a tornado passed near the town and destroyed a
relative’s farm. The county court building dates from 1922 with an ornate
marble mosaic floor and original porcelain restroom fittings to which Liam gave
a thorough workout…
We moved on and got chatting to a couple of younger
stormachasers, one English and one Scottish. Things were bubbling up but in a
fairly untidy and half hearted fashion. We continued west then south on US 14.
Everytime you go stormchasing you tend to find one small
town you keep coming back to over and over again, either as a crossroads to
other places or as you go round and round trying to figure out where storms
will fire. Last year it was Elm Creek, this day was the latter and our
designated Groundhog Day town was Central City complete with Jim’s Food
supermarket and its 35 year veteran employees smiling down from their very own hall
of fame. We must have been back to this bloody place four times as we watched
towers start to tease us before they collapsed in minutes, not man enough to
break through the cap. The cap is a warm inverted layer of air that acts as a
lid or cap on storm convection. You need the cap as without it you would get a
constant fizzling of weak convection and no powerful storms. The cap acts like
the lid of a pressure cooker, and if the rising air can break through you get
an explosive convection and storm. However, if it can’t break through then you
g then you get no storms; it’s called a cap bust, and this is what we thought
we’d got stuck with today. Peter booked us into the Days Inn in Lincoln and we
retreated to fight another day with thoughts of some nice food in Applebees and
an early night.
Storm chasing requires that you have a stoic personality as
you have to get used to a promising day turning into nothing, and that’s sure
what today looked like as we trooped off towards Lincoln.
Ten minutes down the road Peter had a cursory look out of
the window and there was a new tower going up. And up. A red core on the radar
confirmed we had a viable storm. After being teased all afternoon, playing hard
to get had paid dividends. We headed west, and after a brief conversation with
Highway Patrol…chased after the storm and were treated to some lovely structure
lit by the late evening sunlight. I took a series of shots with a view to
making a panorama when I get home. There was also a massive, almost perfectly
circular storm forming way to our south west in WaKeeney, Kansas.
As day turned to night we rejoined the I80 and headed west
towards Lincoln. We passed Aurora and stopped in Hutchinson to watch some ¾
inch hail and I took 20 minutes or so of spectacular lightning video. The storm
became tornado warned for quite a while and Reed Timmer called in a tornado
somewhere to our south west.
We got to the hotel, and after a comical 20 yard drive to
the McDonalds drive through (nobody walks in the US!) we came down to watch the
storm approach the hotel. My MyWarn app told me we were under a severe storm
watch and this then turned to a warning around midnight. There was now a line
of storms down the I80 heading to our location. It’s a bit unnerving knowing
that a storm that has previously been tornado warned is heading directly for
you, but this is intentional as you get a front row seat and can drink a couple
of beers as well
Anne, Liam, Jock and I went outside the hotel, sat under a
veranda and watched the torrential rain hit us accompanied by a spectacular
lightning show. The night turned back in to day thanks to the intensity of the
lightning and one massive bolt overhead generated the loudest thunder I have
ever heard. The hotel reverberated and we jumped in the air in fright and
squealed like a bunch of schoolgirls.
With the bathroom sink full of icy water chilling some bottles
of beer, I set about the usual nightly grind of backing up photos and videos to
hard drive, setting various things to charge up and went through the
frustrating (and fairly unsuccessful) experience of trying to get photos to
upload to this blog.
Total miles: 320
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