Day two - Sat Aug 4

Day two is a longish drive: San Jose to Barstow. The day starts with getting to SJSU by 0830, only to find the painters have arrived (on Saturday) and covered almost the entire department in plastic! But luckily we were able to find the pile of stuff we needed. Luckily also Josh Diamond showed up with a box of donuts! Mmmmmm...donuts!! Packing was pretty easy, probably because we have 3 vans and the sodar trailer to cram everything into!

First exciting news was the appearance over the southern horizon of what looked like virga! Sure enough, radar revealed a line of showers (yes!!) moving northwestward up the Salinas River valley. So there was a certain amount of grumbling along the lines of "We are driving to a heatwave Arizona when we could have stayed here?!?!?!?!" WHATEVER!!

It turns out to take a LONG time to eat lunch when there are 22 of you! As we found out at Subway in Coalinga!! Will have to plan this better tomorrow. But by about 4 we were climbing up over the Tehachapi Pass onto the high desert, driving towards a nice cell moving northward over Edwards AFB! Naturally like a bunch of little kids we had to stop and look for lightning (we haven't had time for the "lightning safety" lecture yet!) And then we had to pull over again when it started to pour, and we got to test out our new rain jackets that we got for the trip (having rain jackets will definitely put a hex on the best of trips!!)

Tonight, after the usual trip next door to Sizzler and then a jump into the hotel pool, the students are hard at work getting their forecasts ready. Every student submits a forecast every night for two locations: Flagstaff (our home base) and a random pick. Tonight's random pick is Needles, which was at 108^oF when I checked as we rolled into Barstow.