We've already drove through a storm and observed the life/death of several others along the way here. And to think that last week we had a pessimistic attitude about this trip and future weather patterns! Mid afternoon, soon after we entered Illinois, we noticed a huge storm system with a bow-echo storms heading straight toward us. As we approached the storm we pulled off the road, near Effingham, IL, and wrestled over whether or not we should find a place to watch the storm go by. After looking at the radar and the components of the storm, we decided no tornadoes would come out of the storm, and continued due west. We were on a collision course straight through Mother Nature's fury. After she passed, we had a pleasant but long drive to Missouri.
We stopped for dinner in St. Louis, right in the hammer-blow of rush hour traffic, and we decided to stop for dinner. We tried to steer clear of food chains, and we picked out a BBQ place that seemed local. Perhaps it was a little too "local", because they weren't open on Mondays. We tried a local sushi restaurant as well, and it was closed too. We finally found a little place called Moe's Pasta Bowl, where we stopped for dinner. The food was pretty good... everyone around me raved about how it was the best they've ever had, SO much better than Olive Garden, etc. Personally I wasn't terribly impressed, AND I still love Olive Garden, but it was still great to eat something that wasn't fast food.
After dinner we kept on chugging towards Kansas City. As we approached the horizon we noticed a few towering clouds off in the distance. The further west we went, the closer the storms came. Eventually one of the storms formed an anvil, and it was, as Dr. Call put it, a "classic Low-Precipitation Supercell formation". It was beautiful to look at, and eventually we pulled off to the side of the road to determine whether or not to chase it. By that point we only had about 30 minutes of daylight left, and it would take that long to get there, so we decided once again to move on.
As we drove I was able to take a few pictures. As we checked out that cell we noticed it had turned into a multicell development pattern, where one storm formed on the back-end of another ... it was the real-life version of what we had learned about in classes.
Now we're at the hotel, and after a swim in the Quality Inn pool and a nice, hot shower, we're looking at tomorrow's chasing potential. The storm potential is looking almost dangerous with how great the potential is for tornadoes. Some meteorologists are calling it a "textbook tornado outbreak", with tornadoes popping up all over the place.
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