Room for one more

This blogging thing is addictive. And when you collect some nice unexpected golf ball-sized hail on the drive back to your final destination, it's worth writing another post!

We started in Lubbock, Texas after a LATE finish and we dawdled around a bit in the morning before we finally got going (some people took on some partying even earlier into the morning). We made our way a few familiar places for me, starting with Amarillo, Texas - the location of the Big Texan Steak Ranch. It's the home of the 72oz (2.04kg) steak challenge. Eat it, the salad, baked potato and three prawns inside an hour and it's yours for free. Fail and it costs you $72 but you get a shirt and a boot-shaped cup. A few of us headed to the nearby Coyote Bluff Cafe for a more-than-decent burger and on our return our resident food-guzzling machine Mitch "Chip" Childs (Alice Springs) was mid-way through the challenge and looking in decent shape. Earlier in the tour he downed a root beer float in 45 seconds and some of the hottest buffalo wings on the planet in Abilene, Texas days before, so we thought it was possible. Alas, the challenge was just too much for Chip, but he still managed to devour 59oz (1.67kg) of steak inside the hour. Fair effort.

Funny sign I saw - Happy, Texas LOL

Once lunch was over our attention turned to some dangerous supercell thunderstorms with certain tornado potential... around Washington DC. A little bit too far away. While we were all getting blown away by those storms, a few were firing in far northwest Texas as we headed north back towards Colorado. We didn't really have to chase to catch them. We saw three wall clouds in it, it was slightly rotating and there was a small hail core. It looked like the unlikeliest of little storms and it was doing some funny things. We even saw some REALLY low-level mammatus cloud:

Mammatocumulus

Weird! We went directly north out of Dalhart, Texas (where I stayed on tour last year) and tried to find a road west. Dirt would do. We realised the next major road was 15 miles down the road! We'd be way past the storm by then. We took a dirt road, which we later realised led to a cattle ranch. So we had to go all the way back into town to stay in front of the storm. We rather conveniently ended up in the storm's hail core. They started out as marbles but soon became golf balls. It eased and I got a chance to collect a few:

Then we had a drive to find some more hail and it was a barrage of golf balls and it gradually got smaller and moved on!!! It was even piling on the roof of the van and we had a few :

We saw another nice-looking storm shortly after. It was kind of nice to see it from a distance.



Notice the shadow cast on the main updraft (the billowing bit) on the storm by the anvil (top bit) of the cloud.

It was a fun little chase and was totally worth it even though it delayed our arrival in Denver.  Being a chase without a realistic hope of a tornado, it was a similar kind of chase you could do in Australia. I just wish there were as many weather products available in Australia to make it a bit easier to track storms and monitor their life cycle. If it exists, I need to know about it. Here's an even better sunset photo to finalise this blog series! But I am going to continue blogging. Stay tuned!