I am now sitting in a van from Oklahoma city going to northwestern Nebraska. The trip has finally started!
I left Stockholm at around 9 a.m. this Saturday and flew into Oklahoma city through NYC, just in time for dinner. The dinner was the last day of Tour #2 and the first day of Tour #3 with Cloud 9 Tours that I was about to participate in.
The dinner company was approximately 30 people and both confirmed and threw away all my guesses and expectations of the people that go on these tours. There were young couples, some single travelers, a group of middle-aged Dutch men that were just as childish as you might expect from people spending two weeks in a small van together 🙂
Tour #3, that is the tour after Tour #2 has quite a different composition of people. In my van (that has WiFi!) right now we have Charles Edwards, (our tour leader), a 50 year old woman from Canada, a 21 year old Australian girl (on her first trip abroad) and a group of three female prison guards from Australia.
In the other van there is a young guy from Belgium and an English couple. Practically everyone is non-american and for pretty much all of us this is our first Storm Chasing tour. Most of us do it for the adventure itself and not so much for a specific weather interest (which Tour #2 had a bit more of).
Tour #2, by the way, were very unlucky with their trip and had so much sunshine that they actually got a sun tan! They only found two real storms and not a single tornado. That, however, didn”t seem to have dampened their spirit too much since most of them (at least the Dutch guys) seemed just as happy anyway.
We, on the other hand, seem to be a bit more lucky with the weather. The Jet Winds that have been lying over Canada lately have started to move southwards, which is a necessity for some really nice bad weather.
Today is a pure “Travel Day” but tomorrow might become a “Chase Day”. We will most likely spend it around Nebraska and Iowa.
The Cloud 9 crew seem to be a really cool crowd of weather geeks, exactly the type of guys you would like to lead you into some severe weather! I have no doubt that this is going to be an amazing adventure!
