It’s flat here. Damn flat. There are no elevated vistas, no majestic mountains. In most places it’s a struggle to find a clean view of the horizon without trees or buildings in the way.
So the one place left to look is up. If you can get to a spot that is housing and strip mall free, the skies of Delaware can provide some truly spectacular views.
The problem is that Delaware generally has two sky modes: The first is pure blue and devoid of any clouds whatsoever. The second consists of a low layer of flat gray nothingness and/or haze. Both are equally boring and non-photogenic. Both are the norm for 340-ish days each year.
There are however, those rare convective days each spring and summer when the air becomes hot, moisture-laden and unstable. Updrafts fuel cumulonimbus clouds to mammoth altitudes in the late afternoons and the thunder starts to rumble. There’s nothing quite as exciting (to me) as watching these monster storms roll through.
Unfortunately, last Thursday we had a supercell storm blow up in western Kent County, (near Marydel) producing an EF-1 tornado. Around the end of the workday in Milton the tornado warnings were coming through on my weather radio steadily. The storm was on track for Milford and then Milton, so I decided to wait a bit and then head as far east as I could to avoid the brunt of it.
Took a bunch of back roads to the east of Milford that spit me out in the chicken land and swamps outside of Slaughter beach. Was lucky enough to not get any hail, just a ton of rain and wind that passed through pretty quickly. A second cell that was much less intense moved through just north of Bowers before heading out into the bay.
