April 15, 2000

April 15, 2000-FINALLY!!!! Saturday arrived. I had been looking forward to this day since Tuesday. I woke up at around 7:00AM and started looking at forecast models and letting my equipment get charged up. After looking at the forecast models I decided to go to SW Oklahoma around the Altus area and left around a11:30. I went north on Highway 59 and got on I-40 and headed west towards Oklahoma City. I rounded OKC by taking the I-240 bypass and got on I-44 and headed towards Lawton. After arriving in Lawton I headed west on Highway 62 towards Altus. Before arriving in Altus I heard of towers going up in the eastern part of the Texas panhandle and saw towers building up to the west and NW of Altus. While in Altus I heard some freinds of mine on HAM radio. Scott Blair and Jason Politte drove from Little Rock and Eric Nguyen and Dan was from Norman. I let them know that I was right behind them. After catching up with them, we headed west of Altus on Highway 62 and pulled off to watch a building storm. The storm was not severe yet but was looking beautiful. Mammatus filled the sky above us as we saw inflow bands trying to form and watched a wall cloud try to form. After watching this for awhile, we decided to drive a little bit more west to find a north option. After turning north on a real narrow road, we drove until we decided to turn around as the storm was losing it's supercellular characteristics and decided to go south to look for the tail-end Charlie. We drove south on some dreaded dirt country roads until we hit the town of Eldorado and then went south on Highway 6. We crossed the Red River and entered Texas and arrived in the town of Quanah. There we filled up with gas with another chase team. From there we went east on Highway 287 to Vernon, Texas and then found Highway 183. We then drove south on 83 where we got some great views of the tail-end Charlie and Lake Hefner. After shooting some video and taking some great pictures we decided to call it a day and looked for some pizza and drove to Wichita Falls. We finally found a Pizza Hut and ate there for an hour. Then we found I-44 and drove to Chickasha where we exited to go to Eric's house to pick up some stickers. We arrived in Norman and Eric's house where we picked up our stickers and then left to go home. On the way I couldn't take it anymore and had to find a rest stop and slept for about 4 hours. I woke up and drove back home. A trip worth the wait and was very enjoyable. The trip was about 800 miles altogether. Thanks go to Scott, Jason, Eric, and Dan for letting me tag along.