Day Two

Day two…blissful much needed sleep until 8:30 am (yay).  Plenty of sunshine and crosswinds in western SD to start.  Plan is to head east on I90 to eastern Dakotas (Aberdeen or Watertown).  Left around 11 am, a bit behind schedule.  SPC has slight risk for eastern Dakotas, decent LL shear but little deep layer shear.  Potential exists for discrete storms, but nothing blazingly obvious.  Certainly nothing like 27 April in the SE US.  Stay tuned…

This is a shot from I90 in South Dakota...it gets flatter as you head east.

So far lots of signs for Wall Drug, some 76,000 sq ft tourist trap in Wall, SD.  Apparently they have a 6-foot rabbit (don’t know if that refers to height or number of feet).

Lots of cattle grazing with no apparent homes, too.  

We’ll be coming up on Oacoma, SD, which represents the highest point on I90, which means I will have been at the two highest points on this highway (the other being in the Berkshires of MA).

About 350 miles of driving today.  Made it to Aberdeen around 7 pm CDT, but didn’t see very much weather (did see a roadrunner, running in front of the car).  As it turns out, we should have driven north and from Rapid City and toward Montana, as that’s where the interesting weather was.  By this time it was too late to head anywhere else (as it turns out there were severe thunderstorms to the west later on), but it would be dark.  All in all, today was a bust weatherwise, and the conditions don’t look promising for the following days.  Nevertheless, it's turning out to be a cool trip so far.  Let's hope for 'better' weather in the future...