The Road Trip
When I was a kid, I went through a long phase where I wanted to be a weatherman and a storm chaser when I grew up. I thought tornadoes were awesome, and I wanted to drive around the Midwest chasing them, researching them and shooting video of them. Well, I got that out of my system.
Sequel and I left from Delaware on Thursday, and drove to the St. Louis area to stop for the night. There wasn’t much excitement to share, we crashed for the night just outside of St. Louis and resumed the drive Friday. We spent the vast majority of the day driving through Kansas, which is about as boring as it gets.
If you’ve ever talked to anyone who drove across Kansas, you probably thought they were exaggerating the boredom. I’m here to tell you, they weren’t. Field. Field. Field. Cow. Field. Field. Field. Tree. Cow. Field…. For seven hours.
We kept an eye on the weather, and there was nothing serious brewing. By the time we got to Colorado, night had fallen. There was some rain, and we kept checking the radar, but there didn’t appear to be anything serious.
It’s about 10:30pm and we’re in the process of looking into hotels in Denver, when the rain starts to get pretty severe. Sequel suggests I pull over, and I tell him I’m fine – I’ve driven through some heavy rain and never had to pull over.
So, about 30 seconds later, my definition of heavy rain is altered for life and I’m trying to pull over. It’s raining so hard, I can’t even see five feet in front of the car going under 10 miles per hour. I pull over and ride the shoulder at 5 miles per hour until we’re right behind another car. I figure if things get really out of hand, it’s good to have other people around… So you can help each other, or, you know, die together.
At this point we’re mainly annoyed, but then the wind starts really picking up. I’d guess it was blowing over 70 miles per hour, and there’s no way it was under 50.
We see an object fly past the windshield about five feet off the ground. It was probably just part of a blown tire or something, but it’s the real life version of when the cow flies past the window in the tornado movies. You look at each other and know it’s getting real.
It progresses with a little hail – about the size of a quarter in diameter, which I hate, knowing that it means there are strong updrafts, which are a key ingredient in tornadoes.
Next, the rain intensity goes from cats and dogs to “Wow, I’ve never seen rain this hard!” to “Is that a wave breaking on the car?” to straight up biblical. We’re in “Get the ark!” territory now. It’s literally raining so hard that you can’t see through the windshield at all.
We’re doing our best to stay calm and try to pull up the radar to see if there’s a tornado bearing down on us, or how long it’s going to last, but we can’t get cell service. I don’t know if this is because we’re in Vona, Colorado, which is literally in the middle of nowhere, or because the storm ripped out a cell tower or something.
So, we’re sitting there, increasingly nervous, looking at the windshield we can’t see out of, while the rain just pours down upon us, and the wind whips past us, when the wind takes it to another level and you can feel it under the car… Not actually lifting us, but trying to. You can feel the gusts and the suspension rising a little bit each time.
At this point, I’ve gone from annoyed to increasingly nervous to “OHMYGODWEMIGHTDIE!” But, I’m pretty sure I held it together reasonably well. It was probably just a lot of four letter words and debate with Sequel over whether we had a move. I knew we couldn’t drive to an overpass at this point, and leaving the vehicle seemed way –EV since we figured any nearby ditch was likely flooded.
So we rode it out, and finally it passed over. We made it two exits ahead on the interstate and pulled into a gas station. That ride was filled with lots of four letter words, exhaling, and saying, “Wow.”
The gas station cashier confirmed that we aren’t a couple of wusses from the east coast, and that the storm was indeed pretty intense. We stopped shaking, gathered ourselves, and finished off the drive to Denver.
Here is a picture of the storm on Twitter from earlier in the day…
And the same storm at some point in the night…
There was a confirmed funnel cloud sighting in the area we were in, so I’m pretty sure we ended up having a funnel pass right over or near our car. We’ll never know if it had actually touched down, though, since it wasn’t a populated area, and the wind could have just been outflow from the storm.
Anyway, the next day, things were a lot more enjoyable as we drove through the Rocky Mountains…
This canyon in the Rockies was pretty cool…
We encountered some snow in Colorado, which meant we’d seen fog, rain, thunderstorms, flash flooding, funnel clouds, and snow. Later in Utah, we’d add a rainbow to the mix, as well as a roadside dust devil.
Below is the view from Green River, Utah, a little desert town along the side of the interstate.
The next two are from little viewing areas in Utah along the side of I-70 where you can pull off and take some pictures.
And, finally, the view of Vegas coming over the horizon at night.
Now I'm set up in my home for the next two months... Resting up for the grind!