5/9/13: First Chase Day

Today started fairly early; I was up and in the lobby of the hotel by 6:30am. After eating breakfast I wanted to look at the newest model runs that had come in to see where would be our best chase outlook for the day. Day 1 of the chase had me being one of the two chase leaders, we got to decide where we should head to. We left the hotel around 8:15 to start heading south toward Texas, ending up driving over 12 hours today. Our initial thoughts were that storms were going to fire east of the dry line which we had thought would be in place near Wichita Falls, TX. Our first stop of the day after leaving the hotel in Springfield was to quickly stop in Joplin to see the city and what destruction and rebuilding had taken place. Upon driving up and down a few of the roads, it was clear to see the path the tornado had taken and that even two years later, much of the city was still in need of repair. Once we had left Joplin, the ride through Tulsa and Oklahoma City seemed to fly by. The next big city after OKC was Lawton, OK and as we got closer we noticed on radar that a decent storm was beginning to form. We made a quick decision as a group that we would go ahead and take the closest exit to try and get in place to observe the storm. Unfortunately, after getting into a place we had wanted, the storm began to weaken and become more multi-cellular. I had gotten a couple pictures of the storms as we decided to move on from the storm and reach Duncan, OK. After stopping for gas and looking at more storm data and radar, we decided that we should begin our trek south and westward toward the dry slot where severe storms already had warnings. Taking state roads all through southern Oklahoma and all of Texas with speed limits of 80mph is an amazing sight. All you see for miles and miles is range land and wide open sky, a place I could live. The storms we had wanted to reach were too far south and west for us to reach in daylight, so by 7pm we had decided to cut our losses for the day and get dinner and book our hotel for the night. Dinner was in Stephenville, TX at a small Mexican place called Habanero; I recommend the burritos! After dinner, we kept pushing south as our chase outlook for tomorrow is near San Antonio, TX, so for the evening we are staying in Killeen, TX at the La Quinta.