State of Place

Travel and storms are both the changing of a place. You sense a distant rumbling that something’s brewing. An oncoming pressure drop. When the wind gets in your hair, you know it’s on.

It hits and jars your senses. There’s adrenaline, fear, and giddyness in some proportion, cut with the awe of something immediate and massive. You’ll have to act spontaneously, improvise, or deal.

The situation could be a catalyst for memorable sex. On the other hand, you might be thrown into an emergency, a tragedy, or both.

Provided you make it out alive, you’ll have been through something impossible to replicate.

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From ski trips, to the beach, to (of course) storm chasing, so much travel is in search of weather. But, after last week’s crazy storms, I’m thinking it’s just as easy for adventure to appear when the weather comes to us.

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The photo above is by Dale Kaminski, aka NebraskaSC via Flickr, taken on June 4, 2008 on Highway 40 near Riverdale, Nebraska. His description below is a travel story as much as a weather story, complete with chase and map enthusiasm…

Just out doing my duty to the NOAA… Weather Spotting….

A chase up north about 10 1/2 miles from Kearney, Nebraska. Close and near Riverdale Nebraska, we had some serious development of an Incredible Shelf Cloud and a Wall Cloud just to the south and north of this area…

Images have been GeoTracked, so you can look on the map to see for yourself!

This was the 1st Monster that was captured that day. This storm was moving North Northwest about 55mph and it had some Incredible Rotation.

I did call the weather service and reported the rotation, but it never did drop a funnel…

Thanks, Dale!

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