6/4/08: Avoided Another Russellbust ™

I left OKC around 10:30 AM back enroute to Kinsely, KS, adjusting my target on-the-fly to Great Bend since it had better road options.

After spending about an hour in GBD, I left to go north on US-281 to Russell, where I sat for hours waiting for the cap to break and watching the pandemonium in SW/SC Nebraska. I even fell asleep in the car for an hour. (I didn’t get much sleep the night before on account of the long trip back from nearly Kansas City.)

I woke up about 8:15 PM, saw nothing in the sky, and decided to head for my hotel room in Salina where I could drown my sorrows. Along the way, off to the north, I kept an eye on a little puff of cumulus that started growing. Rapidly. I got to Salina about 9:15 PM, checked in, came back out, and I had a full-fledged storm on my hands. This wasn’t going to be another Russellbust after all.

Flew north on US-81 as far as Concordia (another super-charming Kansas small town) and the storm, like the one the night before, was barely moving. It was in the area of the Kansas-Nebraska border, about 35 miles to my north, moving away. I found a back road and took a batch of crummy lightning pictures. After I was tired of doing that (and getting ate up by mosquitoes), I headed back to the hotel.