Omaha Tornado Chaser: 6/17/11 surprise supercell

This day was a surprise chase that ended up being pretty fun, but keeping with the theme of the season, NO TORNADOES!! However, we weren't really expecting one. I was sitting at home around 645 pm, when my buddy called me and said that there was a tornado warning for Fremont, Nebraska which is only about 25 miles from my house! This day eastern Nebraska was under a slight risk but it wasn't really anything that I was too interested in. I hadn't looked at the radar in quite a while so my friend's phone call took me by surprise.
I really didn't expect this storm which had a confirmed tornado to last too long. However, since it was so close we decided to go after the storm. We headed out west towards Fremont, and soon could see the base of the storm. To our surprise, there was a very well defined wall cloud but we couldn't tell if it was rotating or not. The storm was moving VERY slow. In fact storm motions ranged from stationary to 10 mph to the south. We arrived to the south of the storm and watched the wall cloud fall apart pretty fast. The storm still looked pretty impressive as it slowly drifted south and almost southwest at times. We eventually repositioned again to just outside of Wahoo. There again we were able to sit and just watch the storm for a good 20-30 minutes, it was moving so slow. It became apparent the storm wasn't going to do anything tornadic wise, so as it was getting later we decided to drive into the storm to see what it was doing. I forgot my charger cord for my computer so it had died already and we had no idea how strong or large the hail was. Earlier, it was warned for golf ball sized hail. We headed north up the highway and soon ran into rain and nickel or so sized hail. We stopped off to the side of the road for a while and soon turned south to head back out of the storm. Back where we were sitting we must have missed the strongest part of the storm, as on the way down the highway we suddenly ran into a very intense area of rain and hail up to quarter sized. The visibility was down to near zero and the sound was deafening! We were having to yell at each other in order to hear ourselves. About 1-1.5 minutes later we were out of the storm and headed home
I wanted to comment on the picture of the baby birds below. While we were sitting outside of Wahoo, we were parked next to a reflector sign that was bent up on the bottom making a kind of "shelf". We noticed there was a nest there and a few baby robins inside the nest. The mother was actually in the area and would come back and feed the babies. We kind of became "worried" about whether these birds would make it with the very slow moving hail storm moving towards the location of the nest. We didn't go back after the storm would have gone over their spot so we're not sure if they survived!