Anywho, I wanted to start a blog for this summer since I would be doing some interesting work with Vortex 2. You can learn more about this here ------->http://www.vortex2.org/home/ and here: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/vortex2/. Pretty much what my role in Vortex is to launch weather balloons and collect data referencing various environmental type things like (air temperature and such). I don't want to get to much into dropping meteorological terms on yall so I'll just leave that be and get to moving on to the good stuff----------->>>> DIALOGUE, PICTURES, and VIDEOS that everyone loves. I know half of yall don't like to read so we'll be getting to the more photogenic stuff here in a bit. Well right now actually.
As my professor and applicant approver Dr. Parker ( http://www.meas.ncsu.edu/mdparker/ ) would say , I'm going to give yall the "Quick and Dirty" version of my journey out to meet with the Vortex teams to begin chasing storms and launching weather balloons.
So, to get started, I had to leave my home at like 6am in order to meet up with the other new members heading out to Vortex. We met up in Raleigh to leave at 9am. The other two people were Nate Hardin and Katie Craven. Both cool peeps, Nate was a TA in a few of my classes at NCSU and Katie is a fellow classmate of mine. Anyways, we had to meet up in Raleigh to drive out to meet up with rest of the teams that were already out in the field. SN: Vortex started on May 1st so we're with the first crew swaps. But yeah, we drove from Raleigh, NC to Colby, KS. Let me tell you, it was long but fun.
So we drove pretty much cross country in this NC van which had ZERO acceleration compared to my nice 2001 Oldsmobile Alero lol. But at any rate, Nate took up the first leg which led us into the Virginia mountain area. I took over from there and ended up taking a wrong road, DAMN GPS but anyway it wasn't my fault but we still ended up good. I ended up driving from Virginia, I believe somewhere like Roanoke, VA to almost Lexington, KY. Man, those road were crazy curvy and I had to continuously slow down. Plus it was up and down curvy roads through the mountains. It was ridiculous indeed. Well while I was driving, don't judge me, I snagged some quick pics. The pic you see above was driving through those mountains. I wasn't driving fast so don't worry but I wanted to get some pictures. Here are the rest below.
So after my driving stint, I moved to the back of the van where Nate had laid our fortress of solitude. Sorry I don't have a pic but it was very comfortable. You can ask Nate, I did get the best use out of that back seat as I slept wonderfully and even snored a little bit every know and then but they didn't mind. So we traveled some more and were hoping to make it to St. Louis, Missouri so on the next day we could have less time to meet up with "ARMADA" or convoy of Vortex 2 teams.
To make it short Katie and Nate finished up driving and we made it to St. Louis by about 11pm after starting out at 9am. Here is proof:
That's the arch in St. Louis if you can't see it. Cross the Mississippi too so that was another thing that was cool or what not. We stayed in a pretty nice Hampton Inn that night so it was all good. So yeah I covered new states that I hadn't been through including Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.Moving on to our meeting up in Colby, Kansas. It was pretty long drive on May 23rd. We drove across Missouri into Kansas along I-70 most of the way. A lot better than driving in VA and KY for me since it was more flat. I got some cool pics of wind farms, they may be hard to see but o well, you get the picture LOL pun intended.
Yeah so after that we kept on I-70 and we stopped at a famous place called Arthur Bryant's, known for their barbecue. Danny Glover and Steven Spielberg have eaten there. Peep out my plate. I tore this up the day after.
And also above is a picture of the authentic proof so no one can say I lied. The sauce they had was way different from back home in North Carolina but it was good.
So after that pit stop, we booked it to Colby, Kansas to meet up with the other teams. On our way we actually encountered a few storms and as we made it to our hotel, a tornado was seen about 10 miles to our west so we got our storm chase on a little early but not really. We didn't see it cause we were in the room. Someone, who shall remain nameless, seen a wall cloud but thought nothing of it. HAHA. I have few shots of Mammatus cloud but I will show those to you all in another blog for boringness sake.
After that, we pretty much had a normal night other than the evacuation of the hotel due to a possible fire that I showered through. Other than that we operated the next day, which was very crazy. I will have an update soon reviewing that. I will try to post as much as I can when I can but most of the time after operations I am ready to shower and hit the hay stack (Bed). Stay tuned.
Graylen
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