May 27, 2009 Rio Grande Lightning

The target area on May 27 was around Fort Stockton, maybe 4-5 hours from
Abilene.  Well, that is if you don't get a flat tire.  Rob's minivan got a flat,
and we were able to roll into Coahoma.  The two tire places there were next door
to each other, but both tire repair guys were out to lunch.  We put the little
spare doughnut tire on the minivan, and then the tire guy arrived.  He checked
the punctured tire and said that it would not be a good idea to try to drive on
it were he to fix it.  And, he didn't have a similar replacement tire.  So, we
drove the 15 miles into Big Spring on the spare.  Rob and I dropped the guests
off at the Cajun fish place for lunch, and bought a new tire at Don's Tire
place.  This cost us about an extra hour, and storms were already going up
southwest of Fort Stockton.  I elected to drop south to I-10 from Big Spring,
and from there we dropped southwest to Sanderson.  Along the way, a big storm
developed near Marathon, well south of Fort Stockton.  We tried to get to it,
but when it started to turn to the south and follow the road south out of
Marathon, we knew we were cooked.  We managed to get a view of the cell from the
north side, about 25 miles away, along U.S. 90.  It was about an hour before
sunset, and our only chance to salvage something were new strong towers well to
the east, northeast of Dryden.  After blasting east for a couple more hours, we
were near a strong cell with a lot of lightning, just north of Langtry (on the
Rio Grande).  There was some low-level structure with the updraft, but the main
attraction was the frequent CG lightning.  We stopped a few times south of the
storm to photograph the lightning, before being chased farther southeast to Del
Rio by additional cells.