Day 3 recap and day 4

So we ended up in New Mexico for lunch, waiting for storms to start in that region. They soon did, with towers going up over the Raton Mesa area. Thing is, they stayed on the rocks for a long long time. They just kept pounding the same area; at one point, the hail markers on GR were over 3 inches. I figure there had to be some flash flooding somewhere in northeast New Mexico yesterday. We sat on Bob's road for a while then, watching and waiting, all the while tossing around the football. Storms then decided to move--slowly, mind you--off the terrain but by this point there were a bunch of them, and it looked like destructive interference was occurring. In addition, we were getting chilly--I had to put on my hoodie. But at one point, a storm just to our northwest seemed to have a good look to it, sort of LP. It didn't look that hot on RADAR, so we made an executive decision to go after towers that were looking pretty healthy to our northeast. We also noted a line of cumuli trying to get interesting well east of the cluster action, in the western Texas panhandle. As we got a little farther east, the towers to the northeast were visually and on RADAR looking increasingly meh. So we decided at that point that we would go to Kansas and call it a night, repositioning for the next day (today). Along the way we were watching an interesting storm all by its lonesome in southwest Kansas. It was clearly a multicell, as the anvil being blown downwind would show a wavelike formation, indicating successive updraft pulses. It gradually began to acquire a backsheared anvil, so we decided to investigate. As we got closer, reports of golf ball hail from the now-warned storm came in, and it looked impressive. But, as seems to happen a lot, the storm decided to stop its production of anything once we got within looking distance; it didn't die as quickly as the storm the previous evening, but it was clearly dying. So we decided to drive along to dinner and bed for the evening whereupon we saw that the line of cumuli in the west Texas panhandle had grown into a beast of a supercell, and tornado reports were coming in from it. D'oh! The hail marker was well over 3 inches, and it had a pretty meaty RADAR presentation, so it looked to me like it was an HP beast with a tornado in there somewhere. It didn't last too long, however, as it was quickly to be overtaken by a pretty impressive squall line that evolved from the cluster we had been on a few hours before. Now onto today. Today looks like a gamble, in a weird kind of way. For a few reasons (don't want to drive crazy amounts, skeptical about moisture) we decided to forgo the risk in the Dakotas (close to home) and chase down the lee trough in Nebraska. A lot of chasers are in the Dakotas today, but it's been my experience that, in these strongly-forced situations, storms go early and in big numbers, while farther down the line, in the more capped environment, a more isolated beast goes up. We're hoping for and banking on that. As always, time will tell.