Positive start for reunited crew

The old tornado chasing gang of Shanda, Val, Melissa and I was back together again yesterday to seek redemption for our tour of nothingness in 2011. And today we almost got what we were looking for. But more on that later. Yesterday was a bit of the reunion and team meet and greet, but most of the bunch knew what we were in for with all but three having been on tours in 2011. We were all able to bond immediately comparing stories about our entertaining tour leader Dave Holder, who provided a few funny highlights last year despite not seeing tornadoes. Dave's an English citizen but has lived in the US most of his life having spent time in Philapelphia  and studied in Oklahoma. You wouldn't know he was English unless he told you (or you read my blog). He does have a few rather interesting traits, which is part of the reason people keep coming back. Everyone has a story about Dave. The good thing is he's an Oklahoma City Thunder fan (for those NBA lovers out there). I adopted them as my team having spent a bit of time in Oklahoma last year.

But before we get to talking about our LONG drive on our first chase day, I have to mention the State of Origin. Queenslander!!!! You beauty. I got up at about 3.45am in Denver to set up the live stream on my laptop. I tried so many sources that wouldn't work and JUST got in before the game began. The first half went off without a hitch, but by the time I hit the second the stream had it and I had some commentary coming through over Facebook before getting the feed back for the final 10 minutes. I thought:

1. Michael Jennings deserved to see the sin bin coming in third man in throwing a flying right hook to spark the all-in near the start.

2. NSW stuffed up a heap of chances and made bad choices, which is why they lost the game.

3. Cameron Smith and Brent Tate were our best

4. NSW had a good expansive game, good kick and chase and put pressure on Qld.

5. Qld had a hopeless kicking game and the defence was pretty loose (until NSW got close and made errors)

6. The Inglis try at the end probably wasn't one but at the end of the day Qld had the upper hand before that try was even scored. Add to that we would have got the ball back 10m out due to a NSW knock on in that play before the ball was kicked out of the hands of Inglis.

I'm glad I'll be home for the next game.  The lack of sleep caught up with me later that night (as I wrote this blog in the van on the way to the hotel somehow. Fortunately I was all up and ready to go when we left at 7am from our hotel in Denver. As opposed to last year, this year there are two vans, the blue van (last year's, the one with the webcam in it) and the red van (both SOOOO much more comfortable than the vans last week where we crammed 14 into one of them). It would have been wrong for me to pick the blue van as I proudly sported my Queensland jersey after our win, so it was into the red van with last year's crew, Mitch from Alice Springs, Nicole from Ballarat (again, I was one of five Australians on the tour - the other two were from Melbourne) and Cara from Illinois (C or K?). Another tour guide Blake, who has an uncanny ability to mimic accents, joined us from blue van just before we started the chase.

Red van - first session. Front - me and Shanda, Row 2 - Val, Row 3 - Nicole (L), Melissa (R), Row 4 - Mitch (L), Cara (R)

Red van... or blue van?

The first stop was the Extreme Tornado Tours custom of a morning coffee stop at Starbucks (they're everywhere). I wanted to keep going for the day so I got a chai latte as I would if I ever went to a coffee shop at home. The barista said I should chai to have a nice day. It's my style of comedy. Well I certainly needed something to laugh at on the drive, as we literally drove through the middle of nowhere (basically abandoned towns, no gas stations, no nothing) in eastern Colorado to prepare for either chasing storms in eastern Nebraska or getting into position for the next day set to be in Wisconsin. All we saw was grass and a motor racing circuit (amazingly, not an oval speedway). We stopped in at a Pizza Hut (eat-in!) for lunch. I went to order my pizza. No hawaiian. Ok, so I made my own - ham, cheese, bacon, pineapple. Sounds easy enough. Well, not if you're the waitress at the restaurant. I said it about three times and everyone else understood me, but not this lady. When she eventually took my order she thought it sounded a bit odd (has she never heard of a hawaiian pizza???).

That was about the only thing interesting that happened before we got to the serious part of the day. I wasn't expecting to be chasing storms today, but was still prepared to get some photos. We stopped in at a gas station in Kearney, Nebraska as we waited for another tour guide - Kevin, who built the Dominator (a tornado intercept vehicle which catches the eye of everyone in town when it stops or blasts through) and Dominator 2, which we are likely to see the latter and their navigator and 'extreme meteorologist' Reed Timmer tomorrow - to catch up to us. It marked the end of my tenure in the co-driver seat, where DJ Killa Grams was back in the house. The van enjoyed my chase CDs I'd done up for the trip. We stopped probably 20 minutes after Kevin arrived and joined the blue van to view some developing cumulus cloud, which matured rapidly and the chase was on! It wasn't long after that we saw several dust devils/gustnadoes and minutes later and rising dust everywhere indicating the air getting sucked into the storm. Add to that driving through 40-50mph winds and it was difficult to see and to keep up with the storm. Once we made it through the dust we saw new funnel-shaped lowerings forming once in a while, rapidly rotating clouds and a period of intense CG (cloud to ground) lightning strikes. I even heard tornado sirens for the first time as we travelled through the town of Garland. The longer we followed the more it looked like a tornado could happen, but any chance of that ended just before we hit Omaha. Reports suggested the storm we were on produced hail 3.5 INCHES in diameter. We kept on for a couples of hours longer into the night before staying the night in Des Moines, Iowa. Here are a couple of photos from the day.

Cloud lowering on our storm

Dirt kicked up by inflow winds

A proper dust devil/gustnado

Tomorrow it looks at this stage as if we will be heading north in the morning a couple of hours to Albert Lea, Minnesota before heading west and a bit further north to Wisconsin, which has a better chance of tornadoes than today. Actually we've just moment ago been told it will be a HISTORIC tornado event so get on the live stream live.tvnweather.com when you wake up and you might se us chasing one (we're the one tagged Extreme Tornado Tours or ETT or something). Our guides got on the right storm today but it didn't quite happen. But it has only been one day and it's already been better than last year's tour, which yielded nothing.

I've still got a fair few photos to upload to Facebook from Grand Canyon onwards, so stay tuned for them. Maybe if we have a down day on tour I can get them all done!