June 2nd, 2007 Sibley County

I was at a Mcdonald’s near Belle Plaine waiting for my fry’s, just after I had had paid but, before I made it to the pickup window I hear a TOR warning for something near Gaylord, MN. I got up to the window and they told me to pull ahead and wait for my fry’s. It’s in these few moments that defines the chaser.. I elected to wait for my fry’s(and QP w/cheese) anyway. I don’t eat Mcdonald’s very often. While I was waiting I put an area just North of Gaylord into Delorme, I had no data at all. I tether and ever since I upgraded to Vista(forced upgrade, new laptop) I have had a heck of a time with the modem drivers for my phone. It’s rock solid as a PDA connected to Vista, but, as a modem the drivers get messed up all the time. I had NOAA radio and my eyes (and a laptop running delorme). Low cloud bases are great typically but, when the whole county goes up it makes if difficult to actually tell if what part of the storm your looking at with no real clearly defined structure. I arrived and and saw a cloud extending from the cloud base and trailing off (in the photo, it’s just plain vertical), unfortunately I did’nt get to pull over and take a photo until I had passed a growth of trees making it a little more ominous than it really was, their was no rapid movement associated with it. Lot’s of little cells the area, everything was pretty packed together it was difficult to determine what was what. The County got a pretty good soaking. I drove around the hail. I saw what I believe was a small out structure that caught on fire due to lightning, the police were just pulling up when I got close enough to figure out where it was coming from.

All in all not a bad day, short trip in the country.

When I arrived home I downloaded pdanet, works great, no driver issues anymore. Now I just have to rebuild my laptop before the trail period expires otherwise they have a new customer.

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