09:00 – Louise, Owen and I meet for breakfast in the hotel. We opt for scrambled eggs (made to order), bacon, sausage, and chocolate milks wash it all down with.
12:30 (est.) – We had for Penn Square Mall, about 15 minutes away. We strolled the mall, stop in at the Lids store to buy a couple of hats for the trip. We search for a nice sitdown lunch place in the main part of the mall, but discover the food court is nothing but fast food places. Realizing we’re going to get our fill of fast food and convenience store stops over the next 11 days, we opt to move on to someplace else for real lunch.
13:58 – We go over to Whiskey Cake Café (on the southeast fringe of the mall complex) for lunch. It is a little bit of an upscale restaurant (with upscale mall prices). At first I turn my nose up to the beat juice cocktail, but decide on one a little bit later. We have the hangover burger, a brisket burger made California style with a fried egg on it. The hangover burgers are pretty tasty, but I’m not really digging the egg yolk one all over everything. What a mess! Also the burger is so tall, that I’m actually straining to get a bite in my mouth.
14:49 – After lunch we head to the west, in search of a tornado siren. Louise is on a mission! We must find a tornado siren! One would think that finding a tornado siren in Oklahoma would not be a difficult task, but they’re sufficiently camouflaged in an urban setting that it is no small task.
Owen has some instructions to find a siren from one of the servers at the café, so off we go in search of the elusive howler. We end up westbound on Northwest Highway so far west that we actually go past Meridian (due north of the hotel by several miles) and on almost to the point of giving up. We finally reach Rockwell Avenue and turn to the south, our three sets of eyes scanning mirror the treetops intensely. It is actually good practice for scanning the sky later in the trip, so we are not really wasting our time, only spending a little bit of gas money. We go past the apartment complex where our server says there’s a tornado siren, but our scavenger hunt comes up empty. I feel a little stupid: here I am in Oklahoma and I can’t find a tornado siren. Duh!
We decide to continue south, as Louise and I heard them sound at noon on Saturday. When we get to Reno Avenue and Rockwell, we spot a very large tornado siren at the gas station on the corner. We park the car, take a few pictures of “the official Oklahoma State tree, ” (siren) and head back to the hotel. Mission accomplished!
16:04 – After a quick detour to fill the car with gas, we return to freshen up a little before our 5 PM meeting. Our tour guide, Bill Reid, has invited us together to potentially do an extra chase before the tour starts officially tomorrow. There is a chance that western Oklahoma may see some storms, but the real action is up around eastern Nebraska, where intense line of storms is charging at Omaha.
17:00 – A handful of us meet in the lobby to discuss the weather in western Oklahoma. While the weather models broke out potential severe storms earlier in the day, the updated models are a lot less encouraging.
We are victims of bad timing. The day between two tours is the day that storms fire and the whole string of tornado reports come in to the southwest of Omaha, about five or six hours drive to our north. Video from the television seems to indicate there isn’t a lot to look at, but just the same, we would love to be around Omaha now instead of stuck in Oklahoma City waiting for the changing of the guard.
Even if everybody was already here, it’s really too far to go to see the storms, given that we’re spending the night in Oklahoma City. No sense wearing out the drivers for the tour before we really get started, right?
This is not an unusual situation, as the weather is always active in the midsection of the country in May. I’m not taking it personally, but this is a little bit difficult given that last year we didn’t see very much, and for the next few days the prospects of severe weather are not very good. Why am I spending my hard-earned money to see nothing, spending thousands of dollars on camera and computer gear only to have it sit idle. This is frustrating part of chasing: all the preparation is done, but there’s nothing to see. To put it another way: we are ready to rock, but there’s no dance music.
After some discussion, and even sitting in the van for a little bit to look at the radar and extended models, we decide to stay in Oklahoma City. In the words of Porky Pig, “Nothing to see here, move along.”
18:00 – According to the NAM and GFS models, we are not going to have very much to look at for the first few days of the tour, so we decided to just get a good night’s sleep. Perhaps the weather pattern will be more active leader in the tour.
19:00 – I decide to take a little bit of a nap. I wake about four hours later. This would be a time I normally be going to sleep but I’m a little bit awake right now. What to do?
23:00 – My room is freezing! I’m not real impressed with the thermostat that runs the hotel register. I tweak it up to 74 and try to go back to sleep. Hope I don’t get too much sleep that’s almost worse than not enough. Looking forward to tomorrow being a better day.