Day 13:

May 23, 2008 -- We left WaKenney, KS at 11. Headed south until we ran into sun, the place was covered with fog, and we wanted the sunshine! On our way we went through where the tornado was the night before to see if we could see a damage path. We saw a shed torn apart, and some other suspicious tornado made things, but other than that, there wasn't much of one. We stopped in Ness City, KS to get fuel and yummy treats. I got a hot dog, I just can't eat anymore sandwiches, especially after throwing one up the night before. Crazy! We ate lunch at a cute little park area, and we played on some playground stuff. We wanted to go to Dighton, KS, but a storm ended up being between us and the town. This storm grew fast! And it was huge! It was a gorgeous storm, but we had trouble with the road network and seeing the storm. The roads were so muddy from the storms the day before, we were still in the same area. After trying to follow it for a while, and ended in Quinter, we decided we wanted to go south and try and intercept another storm. We stopped at a gas station to clean off the windows since they were caked in mud, and we couldn't see out! Once we cleaned up the windows we heard a tornado alarm go off. What?! That was the first time I had ever heard one, and it was not a fun sound. We decided to head east, and then go south and intercept a growing storm that was looking very promising. We got closer and closer, and saw gorgeous mammatus clouds. Those are fun looking clouds. They might be my favorite clouds. :) We were stopped at this little 24 hour gas pump area, that no one actually works at, and some locals stopped by and told us to go North because there were never tornadoes around there. This was in Ransom, we moved east some more and waited for the storm to reach us. Then we moved west toward the storm. We saw what was either a wall cloud, or a very wide wedge tornado. We got close enough that Dave told us that was a tornado...possibly a mile wide! We quickly headed back east, and then north to try and intercept it again. By that point it had gotten rain wrapped, and was hard to see at all. We headed to Hays where the tornado was going just west of it. We decided that it was a little too close for comfort, so we went east after we went through Hays, which had tornado sirens going off. We got off at the next exit to watch the storm over Hays. It was really windy, and I was ready to get out of there and head east out of all the storms for the night. But that was just me, and we were there for a while. Finally we left and headed to Manhattan, KS!

Today -- Headed north to Nebraska, might come back to Kansas depending on the storms, and might end up in Iowa! We'll see!

~Taylor~

Other blogs:
Roanoke Times
Storm Chase Blog
Sandy's Blog

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