Looking south again. Dean Cosgrove has this same semi I think. It's a wal-mart truck too. He had a funny term, saying something like you really can find wal-mart everywhere and here was them deploying a truck.

I get my skull smacked with a stone around now. Enough I had a lump for a good day. The video pans at this point are pretty wild. Dean's account is HERE where you can see the same truck.

It's messed up how fast the clouds at the top of this inflow wall were moving west. It's hard to see them on video, but you see them just enough to think, "Those aren't moving that fast are they!" Then all the sudden you can see cloud pieces around you moving that fast west. I was toying with the idea of sampling this core now. Once I saw that though, I was like, nope, not sampling this now. I'm all for huge hail window busters, but not ones moving horizontally. I later learn the tornado warning that came out said this, "In addition to the tornado, this storm is capable of producing baseball sized hail with winds in excess of 100 MPH." It's not every day warning text says that.

I leave the beavertail-o-fun and head south more. Inflow winds were now peaking. The impression I got from the trees near me here was that the storm wanted them. Not just some leaves or a branch, but the whole tree. The storm was now ready to show off, as if it hadn't been.

Jupiter's red spot has nothing on this storm now.

Look closely at the center of the storm just about to curl around behind, and just above that inflow cloud and you can make out a train of kelvin helmholtz waves. I've seen them before on storms a couple times, but never changing as fast as these were. Just a train of waves curling and crashing in real time.

I put this one on here to try and show how windy it was. My car is pointing ene, winds are screaming out of the ese. I'm fairly well pointed into the wind but not quite. You should be able to hand hold 1/10th a second at 10mm like here. My camera is firmly attached to my window. Problem was the wind rocking my car so bad! Look how blurry that post is and the moving grass. All thanks to wind rocking my car. I had to keep trying to time the gusts to get something somewhat sharp. I was already using 400 ISO to get me to 1/10th 1/13th. The video here is pretty wild, though mine suffers once light gets low to a point.

COD(College of Dupage) team coming south. I'd always wondered who drove those ugly vans lol.

Trying to get lightning now as light lowers further, before the storm overtakes me. I saw this one later and was like, how did that happen to the semi. Light streaks because it is moving obviously. Truck itself should have been transparent like the front looks to the left. A lightning flash had to illuminate it at the start of the exposure.

Took me a bit to get settings dialed in to not blow the bolts out. Stopping down now though just meant blurry storm shots and I still wanted structure images.

The storm had been happy west of the highway for so long. Not now. I head south, too late. RFD/gust front was now racing east. 5 or so minutes of driving fast in rain and I get back out. Head to Thedford and get a room at the Roadside Inn, which was wrongly named. Railside Inn would have been better. Nothing beats 30 minute train wake up calls all night. If you want to see video of this, you'll probably have to buy the dvd this fall lol. Image accounts are already too time consuming as it is.