5/10/13: Near Mexico

Day 3 started at 7am in Killeen, TX. After the group forecast discussion at around 8:15am, we had decided that leaving around 9:30am and heading toward San Antonio would be our best bet for the day. Being that San Antonio was only slightly further than 2 hours away, we knew that we would have plenty of time to get to any stopping point along the way to reassess our situation and decide if we needed to change our course of driving or not. We had determined that the storms we were going to chase wouldn't fire until the late afternoon/early evening after the morning storms had gone through and let the atmosphere recharge. So after driving through San Antonio, it was near lunch time.We found a barbeque place near San Antonio that had possibly the best barbeque I've ever eaten in my life, B&B Smokehouse. After we had eaten lunch, we did more discussing in the vans and printed out maps to observe the atmosphere and where we thought storms would fire. We headed west of San Antonio toward Hondo, TX. Once we had gotten to Hondo, it was somewhere near 1:30pm. Since our storms weren't going to fire until late afternoon we had plenty of time to just hangout and enjoy the hot Texas sun. We ended up hanging out at the Hondo city park to play some basketball and observe the sky. Storms began to fire right on queue as we had expected. Based on where they were firing though, we decided we needed a move west. We packed up the vans and headed even more west, to Uvalde, TX where we once again stopped to analyze the situation. By this time, storms had begun to strengthen and were within 40 miles of our location. Based on the tracks of the storm, we once again decided to move further west and a little south this time with Spofford, TX being our target. While driving west and trying to beat out a storm that was packing 4"+ hail, we had lost internet connection and weren't able to completely see how the storm was moving. Luckily, the hail had missed us, but only by about one mile, but the rains we encountered were heavy enough that we had to pull off the side of the road because we couldn't see the front of the van. Once the rain had let up and we had gotten in the position we had wanted in Spofford, we got to get out of the vans on the side of the road and take pictures of our surroundings. Although storms were not ideally what we had wanted to see, we were still able to see some really good storm structure with an absolutely wide open Texas sky. Seeing all of the open earth is beautiful, from the Texas Hills to the range land. Once all storms had passed through and/or weakened due to the sun setting and a lack of energy left in the atmosphere, we pointed the vans back toward Uvalde to find dinner and a hotel for the night. Dinner was at an authentic Mexican restaurant which was absolutely delicious. The next few days up to a week do not look good for any kind of chasing, so we will be doing much sight seeing the next few days on our way back north through Texas and hopefully reach the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.