We took our time heading up north. We started off in Wichita yesterday morning and made Colby our destination, which is in the north-western part of Kansas. On our way there we stopped at Hutchinson, Kansas to see the "Cosmosphere", which was an aerospace museum. I wasn't expecting to see much there, but I was honestly shocked by how much I enjoyed the museum.
For one, the museum had an IMAX theater and we saw the documentary "Tornado Alley", which seemed quite appropriate for us. The museum also had some planes and aircraft history in it, which didn't really interest me. I fell asleep during the planetarium show. BUT, what was somewhat fascinating to me was the space technology walk-through. I especially loved seeing the actual Odessey capsule that was in the Apollo XIII mission. Apollo 13 was one of my favorite movies growing up, and with a mission that famous I'm surprised that capsule landed itself in a little podunk town in Kansas. Either way, I was glad to see it. We also ended up eating at a little local bar-and-grill while we were there. And that's when we got all the weather reports...As I said, there was nothing going on in our area. However, back in our homeland of the Midwest there were all kinds of storms going on. As we sat in T-Bone's Bar and Grill we were glued to the radars we had on our phone, and our professor even brought his laptop inside to see what was going on. It was terrible... a solid north-south line of tornado warnings marching through the Midwest. That was the same storm system that moved through Oklahoma the day before, pushing up storms so quickly that it made it almost impossible for us to chase.
We pushed on to Colby, KS, and we continued to watch the weather fire up, slightly envious of our friends back home who got the kind of weather we wished we could see. A lot of us were also on the phone with friends and family, asking about conditions and warning them of what we saw on the radar.
The hotel we stayed at in Colby was nice, considering that we've been staying in Motel 8's the past few days. The Comfort Inn was a nice change of pace, and we had fun and relaxed in the hot tub when we were there. One of our professors got sick on the way up, and he went to bed with 6 blankets on top of him as soon as we got home. We were concerned if we would have to call of chasing the next day and take him to the hospital to get him some help if he wasn't feeling better in the morning.
This morning, the next day, we took our professor to the hospital, and he was diagnosed with a virus that could easily be defeated naturally. He was already feeling much better today. We headed off toward Scott's Bluff, Nebraska, while looking at the computer models on the way and seeing if conditions would improve for storms to pop up.
It was a long drive, about 5 or 6 hours. The night before I had ran to Walmart and bought some knitting needles and yarn to make a blanket, and I was SO glad that had. With all those hours of car-riding, there was no way I was going to sit and be idle.The terrain at this point became more flat, treeless, and desolate. While the open-wide country certainly gave a feeling of isolation, the range by which you could see the sky was fantastic. Oh, to live out there and have half of what you see be blue sky and clouds! You don't get that back in Indiana... too many trees. Also, some of the hilly parts of Nebraska were pretty cool. Grass with little shrubs, shallow soils, cattle-country. We also saw some cattle feed-lots, for mass production of beef (basically), which were gross and depressing to witness. Soils black with cattle-waste... the smell was horrific. I've been told I may be convinced to turn to vegetarianism on this trip.... now I see why that's possible. Makes me not want to think about where my food comes from...
We drove into Nebraska and waited for an hour or two in Sydney. We had the moisture for storms that we needed, we had the right kind of winds... the problem was that Nebraska had cloud-cover for most of the day that blocked out the heating that would normally provide lift for our storms. Conditions just weren't looking good, and with the fact that we have potential chasing in Okahoma.tomorrow, we decided to just abandon hope in Nebraska and get as far south as we could. On the drive back we noticed that some storms did fire up. It was frustrating to see, but overall the storms weren't that impressive. We weren't expecting to see any tornados up there, but with big open country like that we were hoping to get a look at the structure of thunderstorms, since we could see them so much better in that wide open space.
The drive back was long... as I sit in my hotel room now I sigh as I think about how long this day has been. We spent probably 10-11 hours in the van today. I actually drove for the last 2 hours to get here. My professor was so tired by the end that I offered to give him some relief. While the roads were easy enough, mostly straight, the difficult part was overriding the winds that blew so quickly across those open fields. Because I was driving at night there was also risk of colliding with little critters. I managed to straddle our van over a opossum, avoid another one on the side of the road, and drive past one or two other dead ones that someone else had unfortunately hit fairly recently. After the close call with that first opossum I was tense for the rest of the drive... and was so thankful to reach the hotel. I'm exhausted... it's been a long day.
Tomorrow is still undecided as to what we're doing. We are currently in Hays, Kansas, and will figure out tomorrow morning what we need to do. Conditions in Oklahoma look somewhat favorable for storm development... we have moisture, winds, but not the instability that we need. If things change, and the computer models show we may have all the ingredients we need for storms, we will continue south. Otherwise, we may get to sleep in tomorrow. At this point, I can't tell which option I like better.
No comments:
Post a Comment