UK Storm Chasing - Tornado Alley (day 2)

Day 2 (15-5-2002) Click on any of the the Photos to Enlarge
After seeing the data early in that morning we plan to go north east to Russell, Kansas.
One hour before we leave the weather channel give out a report for lightning and thunder to the west, we log back on to the net again and sure enough it's all changed. It just goes to show how the weather can change in one hour. We say good bye to Dodge city, Kansas and head for Garden City, Kansas in hope of finding a Burger king with a phone line.
We arrive at Garden City, but we found yet another Burger King without a phone line, I'm starting to wonder if Tom was imagining these phone lines from last year. But we did find a Radio Shack where we managed to pick up a CB radio with a weather alert radio built in and the nice people who worked there were connected to the internet and fetched some weather data for us. What we saw wasn't what we wanted to see. We needed to be north east of where we were. So we headed north to Scott City, Kansas watching the developing Q out to our west. At Scott City we turned east to head for our new target area. We went east along SR-96.
At Ness city we wanted to get a better picture of what was happening, and so in a search of somewhere to connect a laptop to we came across a The Derrick Inn where they opened up a room so we could plug into a line, no joy, it seems AOL doesn't have local numbers everywhere. On the way to the room their swimming looked inviting. Especially as it was 96F outside. Because of the difficulties with logging on our laptop the owner said "You can use my computer" how nice can these people be! What we saw confirmed what we thought, we needed to go back to where we had started this morning, Dodge City.
As we got close to Dodge City we could see the cell approaching from the east but to be safe we needed to get south of it, we stopped just south of Minneola Kansas. The approaching storm was causing some tremendous lift. We watched several gustnadoes (a circulating column of dust that doesn't connect to the cloud to make a tornado).
Just after then we were treated to some mamma cloud, notice the lumpy formation on the under side showing moist air coming down while drier air is rising, it's always a good sign of bad weather.
After it had cleared we went back into Dodge City again and grabbed something to eat, hoping to find a phone line we could use, no chance. By then a Second cell had come along, it produced a text book wall cloud.
We then followed the cell east into the night watching the lightning display it produced, we finally gave up at midnight and booked into a Super 8 in Hutchingson Kansas. Although I've got some nice shots on video the capture equipment I brought with me is making it very hard to get a shot (one frame) of lightning from video camera.
Map of route