After yesterday’s fun/terror the last thing I wanted was for
the hotel power to be out. I had 20% power left on the phone which had to be
used as a torch as my room was pitch black. I set the alarm on my phone for
07:00 more in hope than expectation. I crawled around in the dark, managed to
back up 13GB of photos from the day’s shoot and plugged the iPhone, laptop and
camera battery into dead sockets hoping that they would charge when the power
was restored. I woke up at 06:30; the power must have come on around 05:00 but
the sockets my phone and laptop were plugged in didn’t appear to be working. The
phone was on 2%. A mad scramble ensued to get these charged and somehow the
WiFi was actually super-fast and I managed to get the blog published.
Breakfast was at the same place as yesterday. More stories
filtered through about the destruction from yesterday’s hail including the
devastation of crops which were already struggling after a bad year. There were
apparently numerous tornadoes in Ohio after dark with Dayton being badly hit.
That must have been terrifying.
The SPC has issued yet another moderate risk this time for
southern Iowa, northern Missouri, south eastern Nebraska and north eastern
Kansas. This is our last day chasing which has to be combined with a return to
base at Oklahoma City ready for tomorrow’s flight home. Speaking of tomorrow’s
flight there is an enhanced risk directly between Oklahoma City and Atlanta;
I’m getting very apprehensive about catching my connecting flight home as I
only have a 90 minute stopover in Atlanta. If it’s delayed or worse cancelled
I’ve got a problem I could do without.
A return to base day without chasing would take around 8
hours so we’ll be targeting the area to the west in Kansas. There’s some debate
about whether that area will be too heavily capped but we haven’t got much
wiggle room due to time constraints; we’d all like to be back at OKC by 22:00.
If there is time we may visit the Kansas Cosmodrome in Hutchinson, KS the air
and space museum I last visited in 2012. It’s a cool place.
We head east on the I80 then south at Elm Creek on the US183
and eventually turn off on Highway 18 and stop at Lucas, Kansas looking for
somewhere to eat. Lucas appears shut so we get back on the highway and spot a
non-descript building, the K-18 Café. I had a hot beef sandwich with mashed
potato and a gallon of brown gravy. The beef was stunningly crumbly and the
mash light and fluffy – don’t judge a book by its cover. We go into town for a
team photo and on closer inspection we have “American Fork Art” and a museum
entitled “The world’s largest collection of the world’s smallest versions of
the world’s largest things”. It was shut. That’s small town America in a
nutshell. It was 60f when we left North Platte; it’s now officially HOT at 85f.
We head south towards the I70 and an earlier mesoscale discussion now has a
tornado watch issued just to our south west.
At around 15:30 towers start to bubble up to our south. We
continue south to Hutchinson and have a whistle stop visit to the Kansas
Cosmodrome and Space Center which includes the Mercury and Gemini rockets and
the SR71 Blackbird. We’re quickly back on the road and there is a line of
storms moving north east about 80 minutes drive away. We get to Wichita and
head south on the I35 and that line of storms has now formed a single cell. We
dive south the east on US412 to try and get on the south east of it. It’s now
tornado warned.
We eventually get to the south east of the storm; the base
is in sight with a scrufy wall cloud. It weakens so we have a fabulous steak at
the Texas Roadhouse in Stillwater and it’s
back to our hotel for a couple of Shiner Bock, pack and go to bed. That’s it
for another year.
Total Miles: 625
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