Monday 5th June - A continuation of luck (good)

Where were we up to?

Oh yes. Free hotel, non-existent Hotel Shuttle, no bags and a flight to Dallas in the morning. And a room that smells of attempted washed, but damp and microwaved (in an effort to dry them) sock. The first casualty of the trip. Daves socks from the day before, including the transatlantic and olympic walking between terminals they were a little, well, funky. This is the main reason I wanted to leave the room ASAP!!!

Monday Morning continued with a change in luck for the better.
We headed back to the Airport, on the now existent hotel shuttle, complete with driver as soon as we were ready - to have to get back through Security and establish where our bags were. Heading to the airport earlier than we needed to was also about to pay off...

Back through security again, all good. We went to  United Customer service, with no queue, a totally different story to 12 hours before.

Bags were in OKC, not Dallas - ok, good, we can work with that, at least they're in one of the places we're aiming to be today. We're planning to be there by 5pm, so as long as we know where we need to get them then that's a win.

Then the lovely lady on the desk checked the OKC flights - would we like to take the 8.45am (it's 8am) to OKC? Err, hell yes!!!
I guess overnight there have been some cancellations or something, but we end up with 2 seats direct to OKC, boarding in 30 mins.
There was a bit of a question over the boarding passes, but we had allocated seats - which turned out to be premium economy! Win! So the whole palava cost us a sum total of $20 for the non-existent Hotel Shuttle.

A very pleasant 1hour flight to OKC passed without incident. Stroopwaffel for a snack (breakfast) and a drink and we're there. IN OKC, 7 hours before we thought we would be, with no 6 hour drive..... What a relief.

At Will Rogers airport we find the United Luggage claim office, closed temporarily, but through the glass windows are OUR BAGS!!! Wooohoooooo. It was so nice to be reunited with them. *Hello bag, I've missed you*

So we wait for another existent (but was questionable for a while) Hotel Shuttle.

Arrived to our hotel for the night and both have epic length showers, with clean clothes, full complement of toiletries (DEODORANT!!) and all the other comforts that we didn't have the night before.

After feeling a bit more human, we headed off to the local outlet mall, where I indulged my longstanding addiction to Oakley sunglasses. New Polarised lenses purchased, that were also another 30% off - making them about half the price back home. Some perfume and a new NF jumper (I'm a sucker for a jumper... we need so many of the damn things  - I will need a purge when I get home tho).

First Burger of the trip at Smashburger, deeeelicious, with haystack onions instead of fries (I'm trying to be good with the carb intolerance...) - I was feeling hungry! Having struggled with jetlag induced Acid reflux for the last 2 storm chasing trips, this was a bit of a breakthrough!!! It means my "jetlag allowance days" strategy is paying off.

Back to the hotel via the AT&T store for a Sim card to give me a USA number (I've now had Denver and Oklahoma numbers) and unlimited data while I'm here.

The rest of the afternoon was spent Chilling in the hotel room, I had a 3 hour nap to catch up on some sleep and then watched some interesting TV.... one about North Korea and the regime under Kim-jong-il and the other about invasive species in the USA.

No dinner tonight, wasn't hungry. Slept solidly from about 11pm until 4am (not too shabby) which was a big step towards getting onto Yank time :) Onto Monday!!!

All in all a very productive day which turned out a lot better than expected. :) With news from various sources that the high pressure ridge currently over the high plans which generally blocks the development of severe tornadic storms should be breaking by friday - first day of chasing :)

"Ding dong the ridge is dead, which old ridge? the wicked ridge. Ding dong the wicked ridge is dead!"

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