We started the day in Vermillion, SD and needed to get south. I worked a few stations from SD, drove through Iowa, and ended up crossing into Nebraska through Omaha. Around then, we realized the APRS tracking was not operational. It had been sporatic throughout the entire trip, so I figured it was time to stop in at a Radio Shack and get some necessary components for reseting/reprogramming the TinyTrak3. There was a Radio Shack in Lincoln that was open on Sunday, so we stopped there and repaired the TinyTrak3. It lasted another 15 minutes or so.
At this point, we've killed our chances of getting into central Kansas, so I begin to tinker with county hunting again. I picked up a few new counties, and WT0A informed us we were one county away from him. He also gave us a heads up about the weather that was approaching. As it turns out, there were several severe warned cells like two counties south of our current location. We looked around and could barely make out anything through the haze, but we ended up turning around and jetting southeast to get in front of the cells. I figured we'd catch up to WT0A at some point, but instead, we operated from like 6 of the 8 counties adjacent to his, and never got to thank him in person for his heads up!
We were previously headed west on I-80, just passing York, NE. We hung a U and then headed southeast through Crete, NE and then to Wilber. From here, we could see the precipitation core of one cell approaching. It was warned, but mostly on account of high winds, with gusts over 70mph on the initial warning.
After speaking with a few concerned locals, we decided that we needed to get farther southeast. Instead, we got hit with some high winds, as we made our way down NE-103. Lots of blowing dust and some light precipitation slowed our travel a bit, but the storm gusted out. We called it a night in Beatrice, NE, having dinner at an Italian Buffet place that had really good bread.