Day 10: Out With A Bang!

Our final chase day...wow. I woke up at 7:30 with a bit of a stomach and nausea issue. All the food I ate on tour caught up with me this morning. I ate nothing today, not a single bite of anything. It is 10 PM and we are headed back to hotel and I still don't feel entirely right. Still, it turned out to be an amazing day.

We met at 8:30, but had trouble getting out the door. Roger and Alister accidentally locked themselves out of their room and the maintenance guy had to break in to the room, which he did just a little too easily. Steve opted out of the last day chase, as his wife was coming to town. We drove south on I-35, then side roads as we made our way to today's target, Lorenzo, TX. We stopped in Childress for lunch. As we drove, we started getting an ever-thickening cumulus field. We stopped several times along the way to watch them grow. We saw an amazing number of dust devils. We headed to the Dairy Queen in the town. There we sat, everyone else having dinner. Eventually, small storms started to pop, so we left, trying to decide which storm to chase.

We noticed the storm to our south about a mile away had a nice base, so we chased it. It underwent a split. We watched the north split, then the south split went crazy and became the storm of the day. We raced after it to get in position to see the structure. Two more storms formed off to our south. We got to where we needed to be, and the structure as amazing. As we watched, the hail core moved across the road just north of us. We drove into it, and golf-ball sized slushball hail pelted us mercilessly. We stayed until it ended, then drove east to get to the main action area. The storm strengthened and developed multiple tiered striations. We raced to get ahead of it, as the road angled north into the core before turning southeast again. Alister's expert driving got us to the intersection just as the hail began to hammer us. We got away and drove on ahead. Further up we stopped to have a look at it. It was becoming magnificently electrified, and the updraft was a sculpted beauty. We didn't notice the hail coming down the road towards us until it was almost too late. We evacuated the area and went further on. We stopped to watch the lightning, which was spectacular. When the hail reached us once more, we raced ahead one final time and watched the remnants of the lightning as the storm gusted out. We stood in strong outflow winds taking in the last storm of our chasing year. Well, some of us. Jacquie is going to be on Tour 2 and Tom will be out for three more. How I envy them. We stopped for gas, I was the only one to stay in the van. Five minutes later the driving rains came and made getting back to the van a bit challenging. We drove on towards the hotel. I dozed the best I could. We made one more stop, and here is where I stop, 50 miles short of our hotel. It's 12:38 AM on Sunday, and our tour is now over. It was incredible...five chase days out of ten, four of which were particularly special. We had a little of everything...LP, HP and classic supercells, amazing structure, a tornado, several close calls to being tornadoes, gustnadoes, dust devils, lightning, wind, hail and all in abundance. This goes down as the best tour yet. Oh, and I learned that hippos eat 150 pounds of grass daily and produce 100 pounds of poop. And that the company of fellow storm enthusiasts is priceless beyond measure. But I already knew that.