Storm Chasing

We started off from Denver with only 23 people (1 was missing) at 8am with a stop at WalMart for the weeks car snacks - 5 snickers and a pot of nuts should do me in case we're too busy to stop for a lunch/dinner.
It was a glorious day and we were told we'd be driving for 5-6 hours.

We drove out of Colorado, through Texas and into Oklahoma. There was a storm that was brewing, but it didn't show too much tornado potential.
Todd called the day's chasing off and was about to head towards somewhere to stay when he decided to give the storm one last go.
It was a good move. Just before we entered the storm area we could see good signs of atmospheric instability - mammatus clouds..

We headed in, and the thunderstorm that I saw was the best I had ever seen.
I'm used to a storm where you see lightening every 30 secs or so at it it's best… well this one had lightning every second at it's worst.
There was only one chance of getting out of the car for photographs as it was raining heavily most of the time so I didn't get any photos.

It was getting late to find a hotel for 23 people; so we carried on driving, stopping occasionally at hotels to see if they had availability.
We found a hotel in Edmund, Ok and the storm was all around us and it put on a good show for us.
Once we arrived at the hotel - we could'nt get out of the car due to the severity of the rain and the hail for a good 20 minutes. We even had to move the car under cover for safety as a broken windscreen wouldn't be good!
The storm continued well into the early hours and reminded us who was the boss at about 3am when we all seem to have been woken by an almighty thunder clap - that one was close!

That day we covered 675 miles - Thanks to Rob for driving all day.