At this point, it appeared the storm
chase was over, so we planned our route to
head back west to take Brian back to his
place. We chose to go back to Hannibal
to provide us a restaurant option before
heading west on Highway 36.
As we moved
south out of Iowa into Missouri, we were
watching new storms going up right in front of
us. It wasn't long before we were
giving up the idea of a sit down dinner
and put in place a plan to intercept the
new storms. As we neared the storm
from the backside, we were given a view of
several bright rainbows.
When we reached the Highway that
would take us across the river into Quincy,
Illinois, the storm seemed to ramp up.
We were in a position to have a perfect view
of the storm's wall cloud. We watched
some minor rotation, but it struggled to gain
any sustained spin.
We followed the storm through Quincy
and into the backroads to the east of town as
daytime turned to night. The storms
transitioned from individual cells into a
large blob. The storm still had large
hail reported, so we went from chasing to
being chased as we worked ourselves east and
south to stay out of the way of those hail
cores.
We eventually
were able to safely work back to the Hannibal
bridge and back into Missouri where we made the
trip all the way back across the state to take
Brian back home.