After a brilliant evening at the ball park it was an early start yesterday to get on the road to Oklahoma City following a quick walk around the Arch and photo opportunity for Bendy Dave who just loves to work the camera.
The St Louis to OKC run was the longest on my trip and it was epic totalling 504 miles over 7.5 hours, with only one stop for fuel and beef jerky.
The major challenge over the journey is staying occupied and to do this I created several interesting diversions to stay awake and alert:
Seat Adjust Ballet- not really a game:
Play with the electric seat height adjust function, throughout the journey you can experience in real time what it would be like to drive the same car if you were around 4 inches taller and conversely 2-3 inches shorter.
Play with the electric seat adjust function and see how close to the steering wheel you can go and cord conversely how far back you can go.
Cruise control racing:
This was my personal favourite, the aim of the game here is to overtake as slowly as possible, to play you will need the following:
A car with cruise control and the ability to adjust your speed in increments of less than one mile an hour (the Challenger has a handy thumb operated button for increasing a decreasing speed whilst in cruise control)
A long stretch of American highway
The game begins when you identify an opponent on cruise control you want to overtake, you then adjust your cruise control to match their speed and then increase speed until you are gaining on them at a barely imperceptible pace and start the clock on the time it takes to catch and overtake the car in front, points awarded for distance covered and time taken. My record was a 9 minute overtake on a truck covering 10.5 miles.
Robot Driving:
A simple concept how long can you drive without making a single adjustment to the speed of the car, i.e not adjusting the cruise control, or touching the accelerator or brake pedals. The timer starts from the last control input and stops when you need to adjust your speed.
Mt record 48 minutes.
Count and Classify road kill- my Count
3 Deer
7 Armadillo
1 Skunk/badger/porcupine/generic black and white deadness
32 UDO’s (Unidentified Dead Objects)
The drive took me through a major chunk of the American heartland covering 3 states, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, although there were long stretches sections of the route were spectacular, particularly the Ozark mountains which had some amazing views, none of which I was able to capture on my camera however here’s a picture of a not so amazing view:
Upon arrival in Oklahoma City I was greeted by my first experience of a supercell thunderstorm, the electricity in the air was amazing and I was able to watch it roll in from the South West and develop into a really spectacular electrical storm right from the comfort of my hotel.
As the storm developed and moved closer the most telling sign of supercell activity was an almost instantaneous change in temperature, after watching sheet lightning in the distance for around 20 minutes the temperature dropped by about 5*C and then the storm really picked up pace, the video below is the first bit of Fork lightning I captured before it started raining sideways and I went inside! The lightning storm was a real spectacle with lightning roughly every 5 seconds for over 2 hours, some striking ground but others just forking right across the cloud base.
The picture below is a weather radar image of the storm an hour later- it was very exciting!
Last nights supercell right over Oklahoma City
Today is the first day of the chase and with the forecast predicting the most severe weather of the year so far over the next 48 hours it should be exciting.