Review of "Tour 5" by Weather Adventures

• Review by: Mark Johnston
• Tour Operator: Weather Adventures
• Tour: Tour 5
• Year: 2015
• Validated: This review has been validated.

General review

I have just finished tour 5 and it was an awesome 10 days!! I chose weather adventures because a friend told me how good they were and he was not wrong. I have chased with a few groups over the years but due to home circumstances this was my last trip to tornado alley and I am glad it was with the weather adventures team! The weather pattern over the 10 days wasn't that conducive for big storm outbreaks and the guides had to work really hard to find storms but we chased every possible setup from the deep south of new mexico and Texas to the north of Wyoming and south Dakota. We saw storms everyday including numerous epic supercells finishing with the dream storm in Colorado that dropped 7 beautiful tornadoes which we watched from the perfect vantage point. The driving and forecasting is shared between Ryan and Blake. They have a good chemistry between them which works well, Ryan absolutely loves pouring over weather data and blake uses his spot on intuition as to how storms behave. We were also joined by Colt and Lauren Forney for some of our chases and their storm chasing reputation precedes them. The service before and during the tour was faultless and blake works himself into the ground to make sure everyone is happy and the hotels were really nice. There wasn't as much educational stuff as you get with other tours probably due to the fact we were traveling so much but blake and Ryan love nothing more than answering questions and Lauren gave us `on the road" instruction on how to use models and interpret data which was cool.

Vehicle review:

The van is nice and drives really smoothly which is important when you clock up in excessive of 4000 chase miles in a tour. It also has wifi that you can actually sign into when on the road meaning you can upload all of your storm footage onto facebook straight away!!!

Tour guide review:

Blake and Ryan are super friendly,funny guys and the overall experience is one of chasing with friends instead of a more formal tour which is maybe a little different to other groups. Blake is super safety conscious and I have 100% confidence he would never put any one in a risky situation. So if your looking to punch massive hail cores, get really close to tornadoes or go down sticky dirt roads go somewhere else but if you want to get into position to take amazing pictures of storms and tornadoes, expertly navigate tornadic storms and have a massive laugh along the way then go with weather adventures

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