Tour 5 – Day Three
I was on the third floor and the internet was hit and miss. I had left my computer on all night to download some photos to the cloud, and when I got up, it had only downloaded eight photos.
I went down to breakfast hoping it would be faster in the lobby, but it was actually worse. I had boiled eggs and tea and we all met up for nine.
The target area looked to be in Montana and we had a little time to spare so we went to Frontier Relics in Gillette.
It was full of antiques with a lot of them up for sale.
Everything from Pepsi signs for $600.
To old washing machines for $400.
And Studebakers for $15,000.
The place had everything imaginable.
Half the building was a museum with cars that reminded me of Cuba.
The hood ornaments were interesting.
I said hello to the Sinclair dinosaur.
We finished up before eleven and Bill had decided definitively on Montana. That would make it ten states that I had chased storms in to date in 2018 and twelve if I included my road trip.
We got to Broadus just after noon and pulled into Stockman’s for lunch. I had an apple pie for my appetizer again, and despite saying it was homemade, it was an IGA special.
I had the bacon cheeseburger which was pretty good.
We headed out at one, driving towards Miles City. After a couple of pit stops we stopped next to a school house complete with swings.
We were watching this storm develop for a while.
And then one to the south started to blow up and Bill decided on that one.
We took a back road about thirty miles and stopped to watch it. It had three cells behind it and was struggling to survive them.
We made a couple of short stops.
It didn’t look like it would survive interaction with the storms behind it and we pulled over to watch the base of the storm.
And we got a great show.
The lightning wasn’t frequent but my time lapse caught the system approaching us until the rain started.
We headed south and the lead van hit a deer that had crossed in front of them and stopped to stare at the headlights. There was no avoiding it and it was obviously dead when it appeared in front of us.
It trashed the grill and caused a slow leak in the radiator.
Once we had our hearts back in place, we pulled over to watch the shelf cloud move above us.
We weren’t getting a lot of lightning, so we pressed on and drove all the way to Belle Fourche with the storm following us the whole way. We stopped by Taco Johns at 9:48 pm and the employee turned out the lights and locked the doors as soon as we pulled up. Bill wasn’t happy about that.
We stopped into a gas station for snacks and got rooms in the same Econolodge.
I was out cold by 11:30.
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