THU 11 JUN
Original plan was to set our alarms at 4am and watch the severe thunderstorms move over our hotel at Omaha NE - so we did, though the most severe aspects (with 2 inch hail and a report of a tornado) stayed some ways to our south. After going back to sleep and waking at 10am, it looked like the resultant MCS that had carried on ploughing across Iowa was clearing eastwards quite quickly, allowing rapid destabilisation to occur to its rear. We needed to head back to Denver CO for our flight tomorrow, but the temptation to drive a couple of hours in the wrong direction to sample the unstable warm sector was too great, so we quickly left the hotel and drove to Des Moines IA, grabbed lunch, then headed south and east into Missouri (ugh) to try and get ahead of the advancing cold front. Numerous thunderstorms had developed along the frontal zone by this point, a few became tornado-warned and we managed to core-punch the Tail-End Charlie but couldn't see any circulation (would have been rain-wrapped in any case).
By late afternoon we had to leave the storms behind (they were lining out and rather messy anyway, though discrete supercells in the open warm sector over Illinois miles away to our east produced a number of significant and photogenic tornadoes)) to start our long journey west, so we drove for several hours into Kansas to our hotel at Hays KS - a quick stop at a travel centre in Salina KS to buy a few souvenirs.
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