Storm Chasing Day 4: A Day of Driving

Our 4^th day of storm chasing (5/31/2018) was a much-needed off day. After driving all the way from Albuquerque to the Texas Panhandle to catch some supercells on Memorial Day and seeing fantastic mesocyclones and gust fronts on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, a break was in order. But unfortunately, this day was still fairly exhausting in its own right as we had to drive approximately 330 miles from Woodward, Oklahoma to Lexington, Nebraska. I spent most of the day writing about all of the amazing things we had seen on Tuesday and Chris continued doing the noble task of driving, so I honestly didn’t take note of much of what was going on.

The day started off pretty comically, as we dealt with the worst employee in the history of employees when checking out of the Woodward Days Inn, as we needed to return the roll-away cot we used for the night. To make a long story short, we could faintly hear him snoring in a different room, so we found an employee in the laundry room and she went to wake him up, and then he got mad at us for waking him up.

We had a delicious and cheap lunch at Hector y Amigos in Woodward. If we ever find ourselves in Woodward again, we will definitely be going back. Across the street was “Five Star Biz,” a motorcycle shop with TONS of confederate paraphernalia. I think it’s safe to say that this shop would be torched within a day if it was suddenly moved to downtown Seattle or Portland.

After this, we began our long drive north. The most memorable moment of the drive was when we turned off Highway 400 onto “Butter And Egg Road” around 5 pm at Fort Dodge, Kansas. I would like to meet the person who named that road.

We’re looking forward to a big day tomorrow! The Storm Prediction Center has been advertising a chance of severe weather for the past four days now as a low pressure system passes to our north, generating lots of instability and creating lots of wind shear. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Charlie, Joey, and Chris