May 27, 2002 Arthur Nebraska

Ah what a ride this was for awhile. Targeted the Thedford area. Crap went up further west in the Nebraska panhandle around 3:30 or so. TD's were pretty pathetic out there, but improved into the 60's just east of the panhandle. Long story short, I about get slammed hard by this bow echo just as it forms.
I talked back and forth with Steve Peterson, as he was still in digital coverage down along I-80. He informed me of the location of the initial crap and just how crappy it was. I had time to drive west to Hyannis to view the approaching weak storms, before deciding whether or not to drop south. The drop south for 32 miles is one I'll never forget. There are no road options out there. When a bow forms it can look simply spectacular before the gust front is pushed well away from the precip. I messed up sooooo bad while trying to capture this and drive south.
I kept starting and stopping recording and at one point I must have forgotten to hit stop and ended up recording my lap. Once I went to record again I would now be stopping the camera. I did this about 4 times as I've now found out. Then I fixed it and could now record the storm again and not my lap. THEN I DID IT AGAIN!!!!!!!!! I'm so upset at this. The whole drop south was amazing and what do I do, mess it all up. I stopped counting after 10 times of starting and stopping wrongly. That is a lot of video I didn't get.....yeeeeshh. There's only 4 minutes of my lap.....the drive was 32 miles....you figure it out. I thought I was recording stuff for almost that entire drive as only 4 minutes was of my lap, when I thought it wasn't recording. This soon to be monster was forming very close to me, just to the west of the highway. This highway turned se, then sw, then se, then sw quite a bit.
I never knew if I was going to make it south to that east highway or not. Here is a look west, still north a long ways(only because I had yet to screw up recording).
This is when it began looking insanely cool.
Then during the hurried drive south, being all excited I mess up(as previously mentioned). This is my laptop.
This is my laptop yet again. Notice the screen saver has even kicked on by now. Man that sucks. Independence day II could have been filmed here...and....I'M FILMING MY LAPTOP!
I noticed that I was off on my start/stopping(recording) at this moment only to screw it up again right away.....!$@!#$!%!
I guess I was too excited and hurried to pay attention to if I was actually recording or not.
Ahhhhh many miles later and I 'figure it out' once again and record fine from here on out. Precip is starting to over take me less than one mile from my east option.
Weeeeee I'm turning east during this.
View out my driver's side window looking north.
You don't get any closer than that. I talk with Jeff Piotrowski later on, further sw and he informed me while he was talking with the North Platte nws they told him there was probably 100mph winds with baseball hail in this(at this moment).
Many miles east looking sw.
Convection above the shelf fanning ne around the bow structure, with some mammatus above those.
This beats the hell out of a lot of chases I've had this year.
While parked along the road 3 chase vehicles drove by and then quickly turned around to the south. I was like, oh boy who is coming back here. Turned out it was Piotroswki. I was quite surprised to see him up here. Guess him and a couple others just chased up here because they were still up here from catching tornadoes in sc NE the night before.
I got south of North Platte and observed a large number of shelfnadoes on the souther edge of the mcs. Winds would be north then strong se as I drove sse down I-80. These are actually vortices forming on the shelf and making contact with the ground. I observed several earlier that never made contact. Many of these I saw at dusk didn't turn out well. This feature moved nne producing this.
It's a start! Yeeesh, what a year this is....still no tube for me.