Day One - The Chase begins

But before the chase a little highlight show of the past 48 hours....

Heathrow early Thursday and while breakfasting airside the images from Wednesday nights outbreak are flashing round the news screens, a stark reminder of how powerful and dangerous tornadoes can be. With the list of those dead, missing or injured still growing now it is almost too big to contemplate. We can only send our condolences and thoughts to those affected and keep away from the areas involved.

Finally our flight is called and the long walk accross T5 gets us to the gate in time to board. We sit, wait and as the plane pulls off the gate it literally stalls. The auxiliary power unit fails, meaning a tow to a different gate for power to be supplied from the ground. Some 45 mins later without air con we finally get the green light and are off again. Only two planes ahead of us on the run way and the pilot announces that he has electrical failure and back we go for spares and repairs. At 15:45 our 11:25 flight finally leaves the ground.

Skip forwards 12 hours and we finally hit the hotel.

Only to find that they have helpfully rejected the shipment containing the network dongles, so after many calls we have rearranged them to be re delivered on saturday morning. Ok so on with the car installs, streaming works, grl3 works, radios are communicating and Barons......doesn't.

Then Barons does work after an hour of tinkering and calling support, cue dancing in the car park.

Then it doesn't work anymore, after another 3 or 4 hours of trying everything possible we decide to leave it overnight and rely on the chasing Barons effect - it normally just works again on Day 2. If you don;t know what Barons is, it is a piece of sattelite enabled software that dipslays the latest weather information instantly, including the data vital to getting to track storms, from the starting benign conditions through to actualyl chasing storm structures in the field.

Update on that later.

Today will see us heading off for ne Texas, and sw Arkansas for the first supercells of the tour, not bad for Day 1 and only travelling a handful of miles. The models finally played ball after a few days of teasing, and now we have 5% warned cells to watch explode into the stratosphere from lunch time today.

Catch you later - it's 6am here and I'm off to hit barons with a hammer and see if it works

Ian

Update - We have Barons!! I will never stress over it on set up day again, it's just not good at getting out of bed quickly I guess