New Mexican Car Wash

13 June 2015

Hobbs, New Mexico is a strange mix. On the one hand it appears to be an industrial town driven by oil and gas, and on the other it attempts to be an attractive and somewhat touristic town. The town welcomes you with huge signs and general welcoming facades; there are many motels offering facilities above and beyond those for the standard business traveller. Looking out of one window you might see some green fields, and another will be a clutter of wires, lorries and oil donkeys working away. This time we had a motel that offered me a working bike machine, and Cambo a pool with as few as 5 cockroaches to train with.

We were pretty much bang in the middle of the risk area for the day, so we started off with a trip to the local lake. Again, encompassed with industry, this small park was an abundance of life. Lots of fishermen were to be found between the clusters of ducks and hissy geese. I ran a few laps around the lake to create a bit of vorticity and stretch the legs while we awaited more information to decide where to go.

When the storms did fire they were doing so over the mountains. This is a very common scenario, but it’s not always clear whether or not the storms will keep going as they come off the higher terrain. Some of the forecasts were insinuating they would keep going so we headed over there. As we travelled some more storms fired ahead of the mountains, so we deliberated on going for those, but decided to make our way to Carlsbad, get a lucky ice cream, and make our minds up there. Once we’d had our lucky ice cream the storms we hadn’t doubled back for looked better than the ones we were now near, so we started back for them.

In the end these got caught up by the line off the mountains anyway, and nothing seemed particularly discrete, so we decided to park up in a spot where we didn’t think there’d be too much hail, and let the storms pass over us. Even with fairly disorganised storms you can often get a pretty awesome and ominous shelf cloud, which we had as it bore down on us.

And I took some largely pointless measurements...

We then sat through about an hour of windy, rainy, lightning-y weather, in something of a car wash type experience, with less polish and more electricity, but generally similar efficacy when it came to cleaning the car.

Once this was passed we headed over to Roswell to begin our 1000 mile journey far to the north of the US for a couple of day’s time.

SPC Day 1 Weather Outlook as at 06:00UTC (01:00 Central Time the night before)

SPC Day 1 Weather Reports for the day.

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