Day 1 WOW...

Roger suggested that we bring our bags with us, and we threw everything into the van and got moving just after 11. Roger couldn't find the registration for the other van, but he eventually tracked it down. We drove the other van to airport parking to store it, then we hit the road. We drove south on I44, settling into conversation as the miles rolled under us. The clouds continued to cover the sky, which was not a good sign. SPC dropped the tornado potential from 5% to 2%, as the models suggested a linear development. At 12:30 we stopped off for some gas and a junk food run. As we got back on the road, the smell of Lloyd's cinnamon roll was maddening. We had brief pockets of sun.

Room him would on balls in and headed Southeast and do we not on who will of him who. When all the time we pull had no cold front. We stopped off in Bowie to have lunch at a McDonald's. And we hung out there for a while while Steve demonstrated would his gymnastic and parked in the back lot. This gave us a nice view out to the west, and dying off the bases are obscenely high, but at least it I tested out the time lapse feature works very well. Stop linking to him a

This is voice recognition at its worst. I am keeping it because it's so funny. We dropped southeast from Wichita Falls and got ahead of the cold front. We stopped for lunch at McDonald's in Bowie, TX. There we stayed for a while as the skies cleared. we watched the radar as two storms formed on it and on the cold front, and moved north behind the cold front. Roger figured they would entrain cold air and die. We moved out of town into an abandoned Walmart parking lot to watch the convection along the front. Melanie called to find out what we were looking at, as the chasecam is active. There was some very explosive convection (even a pileus cloud) that hit the cap and glaciated. We stayed there for a while before chasing the closest cell. We went back north and caught some wall clouds on some line segments. The northernmost supercell to the south got up to the cold front and wrapped it into itself. We decided to go for that storm. We drove to Chico, and dropped south. It took a while to catch up to it and there were a lot of accessory clouds. No structure was evident until we got southwest of Chico and saw a wall cloud. We went back to Chico and were greeted by the most incredible storm I have ever seen. Tail cloud screaming in from the north, intense inflow winds at the ground and amazing rotation. We sat and gawked at it until we were in danger of being caught by softball sized hail. We then blasted towards Fort Worth as the storm south of ours took over the show. 130 knots of shear and a hook from hell. We stopped quickly to get gas and flew southeast. We ran into stopped traffic from an accident (ambulance and helicopter on the scene) and did a U-turn. We were stymied by a little old lady who was too timid to make the turn. We took a detour through a town with lots of traffic lights and then got on the western loop around Fort Worth. The storm's hook closed and the storm went HP before we could get to it. At 7:20 we were approaching a strong core. We pulled into a town and looked for shelter. We found it in an overhang by a bank on the east side. Every available hiding spot had been taken by cars, and there was a tornado siren going off. The storm became linear and we watched it as it bore down on us. The locals said a tornado was reported, but Roger was skeptical. It developed a gorgeous shelf cloud and very dense core. As it neared, some of us (me included) went back into the van. Alister, Lloyd, Tom and Steve braved it under the carport. It started coming down in buckets. Hail to golf ball size obliterated all visibility. We got a river of runoff passing by the van. The van refilled, and we headed towards Waco, watching lightning. Roger got us rooms at the Comfort Inn in Hillsboro. we drove on for a while, and got to our hotel at 930. We all took our bags up to our rooms, and met back down in the lobby. We went next door to get dinner at Pizza Hut. It was actually a very nice dinner, I had a bowl of broccoli soup with a side salad, and everybody else ate similarly lightly. It started raining fairly heavily halfway through our meal, and it really came down in torrents as we were ready to leave at about 1030. We ran through the parking lot, which was already beginning to blood, and ran up the stairs to our rooms. We only got moderately saturated. This was by far the best tasting I have ever had. It makes me glad to be alive, and to be able to spend that life out here doing this.