Storm Chasing - Tour 5 Day Five - The Wandering Author

3 June 2022

Roswell, NM to Liberal, KS

758 km

I had a great night sleep with no visits from my pillows.

I went for a four kilometre walk with my walk buddies and we had a briefing at nine. Bill was looking at two possible areas to the north and south, so he gave all the expectant faces a smile by saying we would stay in Roswell for a short time so that we could visit the UFO museum.

Someone thanked him with a new pair of glasses.

We had thirty minutes to visit the museum and surrounding neighbourhood. The UFO museum took about twelve minutes (without reading anything…granted, I’m a nerd. I knew the stories).

And walking around for some photos took eighteen minutes.

Even the light poles are into the UFO theme.

Apparently, a mayoral candidate ran on the idea that Roswell should turf the UFO theme.

Don’t think he got elected. The business community is heavily invested in the theme.

By the time we got back aboard the vans, Bill had settled on the northern storm and we made a pit stop for one last mural pic.

We headed northeast, stopping at Tucumcari for lunch and then went into Oklahoma. Once we did two circles around the Boise City Courthouse roundabout while singing We’ll be Coming around the Mountain, we went north into Colorado where a storm was developing west of Campo. Storms north of the system had spurned landspouts, which was encouraging.

We followed a dirt road to the edge of the system which wasn’t moving that fast.

The rain forced us to move a couple times and then someone in Bill’s van got a message on the spotter network from a chaser who had a flat tire. There weren’t a lot of chasers in the area, so he was happy to see us show up. While they changed the tire, I managed to get a couple of lightning shots before the hail started.

The tire took about twenty minutes to fix and then we moved west through Campo and re-entered Oklahoma. We made a couple of short stops and then we drove ahead of the storm.

The lightning was quite good and silent as sunset loomed.

We stay at this spot for more than an hour, cluing up around 9:30. We dropped into a gas station for some subway before driving more than an hour to Liberal, Kansas for the night at the Hampton Inn.