Friday, May 21, 2010

Post date: May 21, 2010 12:34:35 PM

7:45 am CDT

After dinner last night (our first visit to a Pizza Hut this year, which is amazing in itself since we normally "hit the Hut" pretty frequently), we were surprised to hear that we would have an early start this morning. I was assuming that we'd go to Cawker City (World's Largest Ball of Twine) and Lucas, KS (several "interesting" spots there). Instead, it would appear that we're going to eastern Colorado / western Kansas:

I have uploaded a few pictures from yesterday's travel day... check them out HERE. Note that there was an impromptu celebration of George's birthday... even though George's 40th birthday isn't actually until tomorrow. The Auto Club (some of our chase friends that we have lots of fun with every year) decorated the lead van while we were having breakfast.

Finally, here's yesterday's travel map:

10:45 pm MDT

Today ended up being a very long one, starting with a trip to Colorado. After a while, we saw cells starting to pop up way up in Wyoming, but it looked like that was gonna be all there was for the day, so we flew up through the panhandle of Nebraska to try and intercept them. On the way, we could see that the best cell was already tornado-warned. A little later, we saw that a rope tornado had been reported on it... and we were still well over 150 miles away. Anyway, to make a long story short(er), we intercepted the cell just before darkness... and it was really nice looking, too! It had great structure, with a nice rotating wall cloud and rising scud clouds. The meso had really pretty striations, too! Problem was, immediately after that, it completely fell apart. It was almost like it KNEW just how long to hang in there --- just long enough to make us drive all the way from Salina, KS --- 627 miles --- before it decided to call it quits. Unbelievable...