After a fitful “night’s” sleep I’m wide awake at 3 a.m. being a generous sleep in back home where it is 10 a.m. Rory on the other hand has a limitless capacity for sleep and happily snored, snuffled and growled for another 3 hours before coming round.
The temperature gradient from the UK to Tornado Alley is always in one direction i.e. cold to hot hence a suitcase full of shorts and t-shirts. This morning was a complete inversion, foggy and 9c, must have been all of 15c when we left Blighty. I honestly think that’s a first, Denver of course is a mile high in altitude but still it’s on the same line of latitude as Corfu.
A bleary eyed look at tomorrow’s SPC forecast has a slight risk (2/5) and associated 2% tornado risk in eastern New Mexico and into Texas which is a significant drive away, at least 7 hours. The following day has a marginal risk (1/5) in the same area which is ok, and these often get an upgrade on the day.
Considerations for breakfast include the hotel, McDonald’s across the road or Denny’s which is a 15 minute walk. The latter doesn’t make the shortlist, mainly because we can’t be arsed with the walk but also because Gary Eats on his YouTube channel recently gave it bottom marks. We will no doubt have our fair share of fast food on this trip (needs must) so the hotel it is.
Our 4 item breakfast is as good as it gets for US hotel chains. This is not a good thing as they max out as “truly awful” and this is no different. Sausage, omelette, biscuits and gravy are forced down with liberal amounts of coffee. Only one of these items would be recognisable to a virgin UK traveller which would be the omelette; the sausages look like burgers, the biscuits are a sort of dry, tasteless scone and the gravy is an unconscionable gooey slime with unknown lumps in it. The breakfast cereal looked an order of magnitude worse with the Fruit Loops so brightly coloured you’d be able to find them in the pitch black. I though RFK Jr was supposed to be sorting this out?
Time to repack everything from flight mode to chase mode with all the superfluous stuff consigned to the cases and the essentials trimmed down to the minimum so as to not clog the cabin of our soon to arrive Jeep Wagoneer, the rest of the party arriving sometime in the afternoon. Rory decides he needs more sleep, flicks the switch and is out in seconds. Quite remarkable.
The SPC day 2 lunchtime update forecast is out: Tomorrow’s risk is now bimodal (i.e. across 2 areas) and is an instant improvement, now showing a slight risk and and 2% tornado risk across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles which chops tomorrow’s anticipated drive in two.
2% doesn’t sound much, but as a reminder this is a 2% chance of seeing a tornado within a 25 mile radius, and as you are mobile you can dramatically increase these odds. The five tornados I saw in 2010 was in a similar area on a similar type of day; it’s also good chasing territory and will likely be devoid of the chaser convergence clogging the roads. The lower end of the risk spectrum is paradoxically better than the top end, Moderate (4/5) and High (5/5). These days are mostly high anticipation followed by abject disappointment, storms often tearing across the ground in a rain wrapped mess with nothing to visible, usually accompanied by legions of local “chasers”. Not fun at all.
Today is slated to be SpaceX’s Starship test flight 9 in the early evening, so if it does indeed launch we’ll try and watch it live, big fan of SpaceX’s fast iteration and advances in orders of magnitude with rapid, and soon to be 100% reusability opening up an new era of space exploration, science, manufacturing, mining and power generation with the expressly stated objective of making life multi-planetary through the colonisation of Mars. This is what I dreamed about as a kid. Just watched the replay, a partial success.
We skipped lunch and hung on for dinner at Real de Minas Mexican Grill. I got the ground beef enchiladas and Rory got something unpronounceable; delicious but I could barely eat half of it and am hoping the half I did eat starts to move down my digestive system. Full is an understatement.
Tomorrow is chase day 1 and we’re on the road at 07:00 for the 356 mile/6 hour drive to Liberal, Kansas which is the northern part of the 2% tornado risk with reevaluation in the morning. We lose an hour moving from Mountain to Central so with pit stops we should be there for 14:30. Breakfast is a grab and go from McDonalds, the way I feel right now I may skip it which is no bad thing…
No comments:
Post a Comment