Nebraska Bust

Chase Recap:

After spending a week in Boston and having almost 2 full weeks off since my last chase, it was time to hit the road again. This time, I had a chase partner. Jari Ylioja came over from Finland to chase with me for a week. I picked him up the 7th from DFW airport, after landing there myself from Boston.

I’m sure the first thing he wanted to hear after 10 hours in a plane and 20 hours total travelling was ‘Let’s drive 7 hours to Salina, KS to position for tomorrow!’.

That’s what we did. A quick pit stop in Norman so I could do some laundry, and then we were on our way to Salina, arriving around 130 am Saturday night.

I woke up around 9 am and started looking at models, realizing we needed to probably hit the road fast as we’d need to try and get to northern Nebraska or southern South Dakota. Jari and I both grabbed a quick shower then hit the road north towards Nebraska.

Our target at this point was Norfolk, NE and it appeared that we might be waiting a little longer than expected due to cap.

We ended up stopping in Columbus, NE and met up with Adam Lucio. We were going to go to a restaurant in town that served Pizza, but then remembered it was Mothers day when we pulled into the jam packed parking lot.

We ended up heading to Subway and eating there, then hanging out for a long while.

Eventually storms started to fire to the north and west by Valentine, but they seemed far out of reach, and still never seemed to materialize.

We went north to Norfolk then started northwest towards O’Neill hoping to maybe catch up to the storms further west by the time they moved east. This wouldn’t be, as we kept getting baited by towers going up then collapsing. Each time a tower would go up, it’d get far enough up to make us think it was about to create a storm, then it’d collapse like a tease.

We decided to eventually stop and shoot the sunset. While we were shooting the sunset, a cop came up and asked us a bunch of questions.

After sunset, we headed to Valentine and ate at McDonalds. We ran into Darin Brunin at the gas station/McDonalds and they were staying across the road with the TIV, so I took Jari over for pictures.

We hung out with the TIV crew for a bit, including Marcus, Darin and Brandon Ivey.

Eventually we got north to Murdo, SD where we ran into the TVN crew at the Best Western. Jari got his picture with the Dominator and Reed.