22 May 2019
“Who owns the hot dog under the seat?”
Salina, KS to Clinton, OK (756 km)
For the first time this tour, I got more than seven hours of sleep. I was up by seven, went for a three kilometer walk and had a big bowl of oatmeal. The last two days are looking very promising with storms in Kansas and Oklahoma. We should have no problem intercepting them and getting back to Oklahoma City for departure day.
We met up at ten in the parking lot for our quick briefing.
Bill said the storms looked to be on the Oklahoma-Tulsa line but he wasn’t sure yet if he wanted to go for the storms in the east closer to OKC or to the west closer to Missouri.
We headed south towards Oklahoma City, passing more flooded fields.
After lunch at Braum’s near OKC, Bill decided on the western systems. The lack of escape routes with the flooding in the east may have played a role in the decision. The last thing one wants is finding roads closed when a tornado is coming your way.
We stopped at the Cowboy Travel Plaza for a while to watch the storms.
We said hello to the bear.
And then we went across the highway to look at a public tornado shelter.
It was interesting that the entrance was on top of the concrete shelters.
Inside, there was a ladder.
Wasn’t sure if it was to get in from the outside or climb down inside. Either way, the first person there would have to make the jump inside to get it.
Bill had his eyes on one storm near Kingfisher and we went back north and west to keep an eye on it. The local news helicopter was also watching.
It dropped a wall cloud and looked to be threatening for a time, but then it moved into cooler air and that killed any chance of further development.
From there we waited near the interstate for another storm coming up behind it that looked promising. We watched it for a short time but it too didn’t develop any further.
We did say hello to a bunch of friendly cows.
Farther east, the systems spun out a number of tornadoes including a monster that went from Tulsa into Missouri. It was quite the storm on satellite.
We headed south then, through OKC and towards another system to the south, but it fizzled before we got close, so we went west towards El Reno and stopped to watch the sunset.
Bill couldn’t get rooms in El Reno, so we went an hour west to Clinton to stay in the Day’s Inn.
Since the targets for our last chase day were in the panhandles of Texas/Oklahoma, we were in a good spot to intercept.
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