Day 8: “Goose” Lays a Goose Egg, Seeing An Old Friend, & Escape Room!

Today was a much-needed maintenance day for our vans, as Scarlett was in need of an oil change and Goose had some other maintenance issues that needed to be fixed. Since everything was far and wide in Kansas add our rental vans could only be taken to approved shops, we needed to travel to the Firestone in Wichita. We had also grabbed lunch at the logans steakhouse just a few minutes away from the Firestone with Rutgers meteorology alumni and friend Dana Carron. Dana graduated in 2021 and now works for AccuWeather as a severe weather meteorologist. It was nice to catch up with her and tell her about our trip so far.

After we wrapped up a nice lunch with Dana we parted ways and headed back to the Firestone, only to find out that maintenance problems were more severe than we thought. The mechanic told us that several of the tires on goose were split, and could have gone at any moment. Had the forecasting team for the day decided to pursue a marginal chance for isolated thunderstorms in New Mexico, we would have been dealing with that on the road and away from help. Since the repairs were going to take an additional couple of hours, we all decided to do some window shopping at the shopping complexes nearby. One of our stops was a very nice hallmark store with a very nice owner, who had convinced us all to buy is squish mellow. After the vans were ready to go, we decided to check into our hotel early today, since we would be in an optimal position for the next day’s severe weather. After checking in we decided to visit an escape room. All of us were split into two teams to do a room each. My team Did the hardest escape room they had to offer. The advantage? We had Dr. Decker on our team to help us solve the escape room. It was a very complex escape room, but our group was able to solve it with only two minutes left.

After all of us finished our escape rooms, we went to grab a bite to eat for dinner and headed back to our hotel for the evening. even though we didn’t do any storm chasing today, the day was certainly a lot of fun!