Days Eight and Nine

Sorry, this is coming so much after the fact...

We woke in Independence, Kansas Saturday morning thinking we wouldn't have much traveling to do. I had decided to park my car at Ed Robert's place in KC the night before, so in doing that, I pretty much committed myself to chasing on Saturday.

We chased north-central and north-eastern Oklahoma Saturday and it pretty much turned out similar to Friday. Storms along the trailing boundary didn't quite develop, as planned during the afternoon, but did finally pop near the OK/KS border near Osage County, where the outflow boundary had intersected the frontal boundary. We decided to play that and took off east-northeast towards the storms. The NWS quickly went SVR on the storms and while stopped for gas near Tonkawa, a TOR came out for the eastern storm that had developed. We busted east on US-60, trying to catch up, but never did quite reach it. The western storm also went tornadic and when we caught up with that, we had to drop south on OK-18 so that we wouldn't drive into the precip core. This took us in and out of hills, trees, and curves. This part of northeastern Oklahoma will certainly go down as one of them spots never to return to chase, that's for sure. Horrible chase territory!

Anyhow, we still were able to observe the storms from afar and while we never did see any tornadoes from these storms, we did see a few wall clouds and a nice mothership look to the eastern storm for a short time.

We followed the storms eastward and at Skiatook (or what Jared liked to refer to as "Skankytown"), we took 75 north, effectively bagging the rest of the evening for our return to Kansas City. Along the way, we were treated to quite a lightning show from the storms to our north and east. We pulled off for a short time to get some photos, but other than that, it turned into a long drive back north.

I picked up my car at Ed's around 1:00am and we pulled into our hotel in Merriam, KS by 2:00.

I awoke with the guys a little late, but anticipating leaving when they did Sunday morning. We all got on the road around 9:00am. Jared, Gregg, and John planned on playing the Nebraska panhandle, if they could make it out there in time and I made my way back up I-29 through Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and into Grand Forks.

I pulled onto 32nd Avenue right at 7:01pm, so my drive was almost exactly the 10-hour drive I had expected. I noted 9:15am as my departure from KC Sunday morning.

I unpacked the luggage, put things away, and went for dinner. All I had eaten all day was two packs of SweetTarts and a Tropicana Twister to drink. ;)

The trip, in all, was a blast and I'm anxious to go again next year.

Here are a few notable stats of my own, if you're curious...

Total mileage: 2,649 miles
Total gas used: 110.049
Avg. Miles/Gal: 24.071 (not bad!)

Tornadoes: 2 (the first is highly debatable)
Reports: 1 (TOR - 8 S of Elm Creek, KS)

No. of Photos: 293 (will be forthcoming...)