Day 7: Garden City, KS to Plainview, TX

We headed south today, across the flat-as-a-pancake Oklahoma panhandle, towards a risk in NE New Mexico into the Texas panhandle. There's a certain beauty to the openess of the Oklahoma panhandle:

We encountered our first storms near OGrady, NM. The lightning was particularly dangerous here, striking well away from the rain, starting small fires in the dry semi-desert scrub:

We stopped just over the hill and watched a rotating mesocyclone form and move to our NE. No funnels, but the structure was nice for a few minutes and we had a nice view of the hail when it moved away:

The storm really got its act together as we passed back into Texas, chasing us down the highway, not dissimilar to the previous day's storm:

The storm caught us up a couple of times near Dimmit, TX, with CG lightning striking frequently around the car:

It produced a stunning, low, wall cloud behind us as sunset drew near, but was still largely outflow dominant. We stopped a few miles ahead of it and watched it approach us as a menacing wall of black:

We got ahead of it again just before reaching our restaurant in Plainview, TX. We arrived just in time to see the city hit by torrential rain and hurricane force winds from the storm. Below is a grab from my Gopro video. It knocked down a huge gas station sign right outside our hotel: