Sorry, it took forever for me to write about the last few days, but they were so phenomenal that I wanted to be able to hit the details hard.
I saw my first tornado on 5/22/08. Only two days before going home. We were in an alfalfa field in Gove County. We were keeping a close eye on the funnel cloud, but we have already seen several previously on the trip. Suddenly, I received chills and felt that somehow this one was different. I watched it slowly descend to the ground and form a small debris cloud. It was so beautiful and it sun was shinning on it just right to give it the perfect contrast. Luckily, it was in a field bothering nothing but dirt. As we finished loading our cameras with pictures..we followed the tornado and watched as it was on the ground for about 10 minutes. We went to another area of convection and saw about 6 wall clouds with descending funnels. We watched one carefully in the distance and noticed it was tornado #2.
By the end of the day we saw 5-6 tornadoes. The last two were at night and you could only see them in between lightning strikes. We ended up driving parallel and through the line all the way to Oklahoma. We saw a constant lightning show. It was gorgeous, to say at the least.
The next day, on our way home, still mesmerized by the day before, none of us knew our chase wasn't quite over. Once we entered Mississippi, we could see some ominous, low lying clouds. By the time we got to Grenada we pulled over for a closer look. Only minutes later we heard Renny and Greg screaming "tornado!". Everyone barreled out of the van and we could not believe our eyes; it was a tornado! A large tornado at that. You could tell that the rotation was weak, but it was touching the ground. Needless to say the '08 chase group made Mississippi State history. The entire trip was unbelievable, and I would not change a second of it!
~Leah Dailey
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