UK Storm Chasing - Tornado Alley (29/30-5-02)

Day 16/17 (29/30-5-2002) Click on any of the the Photos to Enlarge
This page covers the late evening day 15 through to the day 17 when we got back home.
We are still in southern Texas and the sun starts to set. We have flights to catch the next day in Oklahoma city, so we say goodbye to Texas and start the long drive through the night.
The drive of 420 miles goes quickly as it's all main roads. Tom does a good bit of driving while I get an hours sleep, and I finish the journey off.
We pull into a garage at about 6am, take the car through a wash, pack our baggage and hoover the inside of the car, then head for the airport. Tom's flight is earlier than ours so he checks his baggage in, Steve and I try to do the same, thats where we find out you can only check your baggage in 4 hours before your flight. In the hope to get rid of our baggage Steve comes up with the plan to put us on standby for earlier flights, that way we can book our baggage in. Later we wander over to the departure area. We tell them where we will be if seats become available on our standby flight. Seconds later we are called, and in fact we leave before Tom. We quickly say goodbye to Tom and hop onto the plane.
As we got an earlier connecting flight to St. Louis we had a bit of time to waste before our next flight, in fact 8 hours. After getting off the flight we stopped at a bar to get a drink. I only wish we hadn't. If I wasn't so tired I would have reported the bar steward to the airport, I think he must be the rudest person I've met for a long time (everyone else we had met on our trip had been lovely), which is a pity as that will be the memory I will have of St. Louis airport. Needless to say we didn't stop for another. Thankfully the nice people at the airport have provided pay phones with a data plug (phone socket for modems) so I could plug in my laptop and spend a bit of time on the Internet.
We then caught our flight home. The strangest thing about flying back, is that it becomes night, it's not long before it's light again. We arrive at Gatwick airport, have to wait nearly an hour for our luggage, and get picked up by a friend and return home.
Map of route