Never Too Late...

This post is a little late, but I still want to share with you what our team did for the day. This morning around 10:00 am we had a quick meeting to talk about today's plans. We ultimately decided it would be best to get into position for tomorrow's chase day since no super interesting weather was showing up for today.

Around 10:45 am we headed out to grab breakfast at Daylight Donuts in Quincy, Illinois (since most of us woke up late and missed breakfast) and we met up with the other team of chasers from Penn State. They told us a little bit about their plans for the next few days, which included heading out to Joplin, Missouri to visit the Joplin tornado memorial site and they planned on touring the SPC (Storm Prediction Center). After meeting up with our good friends for a little while, we all went our separate ways and we planned on heading toward Memphis, Tennessee.

The drive consisted of some very different terrain. There was a lot of farm land throughout the drive mixed in with some hilly and tree-filled land. We did see maybe a few lightning strikes from afar and a little bit of cloud structure from the distance, but nothing too exciting. Just a ton of bonding time and nice long game of catch phrase. We actually retired it because between yesterday and today we have gone through every single category. Our plan is to get another road trip game to play, such as a Mad Gab or something of the sorts.

Anyway, I digress. After a 405 mile drive and around a total travel time of about 7 hours we arrived in Memphis and decided to stay at another Comfort Inn and Suites (that seems to be the trend). After spending about a half hour of down time, we all piled back into our 12 passenger van and ventured out to find dinner. We were originally going to go to this Mexican restaurant next to the hotel, but that fell through when we saw that it was really small (good thing we did't walk). We then got on the highway and got off an exit not far from the hotel and found a place called Corky's Ribs and BBQ, but parking for a 12 passenger van was absolutely impossible so we turned around and headed back toward the first place we saw. That place was called Buckley's and it was good. We all enjoyed our meals and the food and service was fantastic.

After dinner we headed back toward to the hotel and had a short meeting with Jason, about tomorrow's situation. It seems if anything is going to happen weather-wise tomorrow, it will be early. The general consensus was to stay around the Tennessee/ Mississippi area and catch any worthy storms as we seem them fire. We are in the perfect position to go North or East as needed.

The plan is to meet with Jason around 9:15 am to have a quick weather briefing and then head out from there. If nothing interesting fires, we will then head to Oklahoma by tomorrow night to begin getting in position for this weekend since the next 3 days are going to be pretty uneventful.

I plan to update again tomorrow as long as internet service allows me to. To end this post here is my favorite picture of the group that I took in Hull, Illinois yesterday while waiting for the storms to move in.