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Monday, March 17, 2008 - Northern Texas What started as a promising setup with much hope quickly turned into a crawl back to Amarillo with prayers that what we were originally hoping for would not happen. With Verne Carlson along, we ventured out from Denver the night before, staying in Amarillo at his place before venturing into north Texas. We stopped at Lake Graham off US Hwy 380 just north of Graham, Texas. We were soon joined by Tom Dulong from OKC where we had decided to position ourselves ahead of the dryline. When cells began to fire off to the west, we elected to make a dash to an intercept point to the west of Throckmorton.
With Tom behind us in a separate vehicle, we ventured west on Hwy 380 only to be stopped by a police officer asking about the storm. With the conversation amounting only to the question "where is the storm", we continued on. As I was accelerating up the highway, the transmission went out, leaving me only 1st and 2nd gear. We drove at a top speed of 40mph into Throckmorton where we diagnosed the weather situation and determined it would be best to call it a day and try to limp to Lubbock where the nearest AAMCO was. We left Tom and proceeded west past the dryline at 4000rpms and a top speed of 45mph. Trains were passing us at these speeds. As we neared Jayton, we figured the van was handling well enough to attempt to limp it back to Amarillo. We proceeded north out of Jayton through Spur and then west to Ralls on TX-114. From there, we gimped our way northward and eventually back to the west til we reached I-27 in Plainview. We crawled the rest of the way back to Amarillo where we made the best of our bust at Hooters.
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