Seize the storm

Close but no cigar

Initial target was a line from Huron to Mitchell, preferring Huron.   My forecast hit right – a huge cell popped up around 3 pm and I was off to the races.   Since the storm motion was to the south-east, I elected to go down to Madison first and then cut ahead southeast of it somewhere.   Turns out I caught up to it near Fedora, SD.   It was tornado warned by this time and apparently had produced a rain-wrapped tornado but I’ve yet to see the storm report.   Followed the cell as it moved along and I stayed ahead of it the whole time.   I stopped every once in a while to get pictures and some video.   Saw a few funnels and an interesting wall cloud that I didn’t get a picture of at the time because I was driving…I might have got that on video, I’m not sure.

Crossed I-90 and was  chatting with my wife on the phone and had shot some more video and took some pictures when I thought I’d better move along to get another good position.   I got in the car and headed out…all of a sudden I hear this CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK.   I knew exactly what it was.   Stupid me…I pulled a major dum-dum.   I looked in my rear view mirror and there was my video camera, battery bouncing across the pavement and the camera sitting there.   I pulled over, ran back and picked it up.   Now it’s back to it’s “Dew Detected” status that I had a few months ago.   So basically I’m now without a MiniDV camera.   Fortunately, I still can use my wife’s video camera – provided I don’t pull a dum-dum again.   It was a valuable lesson.   I’m sure rethinking about getting that $2000 video camera…matter of fact, I don’t think I’ll be getting it now.   I just can’t risk making that mistake again.

Shortly after this, I saw a tour group with a lead car that had a license plate with EYEWALL on it.   Don’t know what group it was as there wasn’t any other decals that I could see.   Tried a little searching on the internet for the license plate but no dice there.

On the way back, I swang by a local TV station to see if they wanted some video.   They had no way to pull off the video from a MiniDV tape.   They had expected me to bring the necessary parts to extract the video.   Rather ridiculous if you ask me – they should have that kind of equipment on hand.   Oh well…I went home.

One funny thing I noticed on the way home was when I turned off the interstate.   I don’t know what the heck was going on but Delorme plotted my car as if it flew off the off-ramp and I made this nice wide turn and landed back on the road.   The picture is below.

Miles covered: 214.6
Mileage: 24.6 mpg