Author: Steve

Plans change. It’s too nice here. A low of 42 degrees last night. Woke up to birds singing. We’re not leaving. Drove around. Looked around. Got a good look at another roadrunner. A nice long look. They’re not usually that cooperative. Saw phoebes, juncos, cardinals, blue birds, mockingbirds, warblers, flickers, sapsuckers, wrens, and tons of ducks. Red-heads, buffleheads, coots, scaups, widgeons. Tons of ducks. A very birdy place. And armadilloy too (picture). Judy found one to follow around and get next to. It came over and sniffed her foot. She reached down and touched it. It hopped! Judy made an armadillo hop!

Quiet day. Walked. Ran. Watched birds. Ate. Tormented armadillos. Drove the Jeep thirteen miles to town. Survived a satellite hookup challenge. Watched some football. Outdoor dog washing. Indoor blow drying. Visited with our only neighbors (they’re from Colorado too). A high of 75 degrees. Calm weather. A nice day.

The ranger told us story after story about Texas. Unsolicited. He insisted in fact. He didn’t seem very busy. He told us about Texas longhorns, Arbuckle coffee, peppermint candy, soft tissue, Comanche Indians, Mexican slaves. The capture/capture/recapture of the settler’s child by the Indians, then back from the Indians by the settlers twenty-five years later, then by the settlers again after she escaped them to go back to the Indians. And a ghost story. A really bad ghost story. And boy scouts. And the ampitheater. They had an amiptheater until they got boy scouts. Now they don’t have an ampitheater anymore. It’s a logical sequence of events. The boy scouts spotted a rattlesnake. So they chased it into some rocks. They couldn’t get it to come out of the rocks, so they set the dry grass that was mixed in with the rocks on fire to flush it out. It still wouldn’t come out, so what else could they do but keep adding more fuel to the fire until they were successful? Maybe they were after their “persistence” merit badges. The wind came up. The ampitheater went up in flames, as did the rest of that section of the park.

Checked the weather forecast. It is going to get colder here. It is going to rain to the east. We’d better go south.

We awoke this morning to find not only did we spend the night in the Dairy Queen parking lot, we spent the night by the lake next to the Dairy Queen parking lot. There is a lake right next to us. How cool! Nice night too. We’ve been having nighttime lows of twenty degrees at home. Last night’s low was 39. Balmy.

Drove off watching the flocks of birds wandering back and forth across the horizon. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on direction except within each flock. The flocks criss-cross the sky. Saw our first roadrunner of the trip today. Haven’t seen an armadillo yet. There was no traffic when we left Boise City. I watched the odometer. We drove forty miles before we encountered the first car headed our direction. Love a lonely highway.

We have our first unsolved mystery. I had a mid-moring snack of celery and cream cheese. I had four pieces to eat, but had only eaten two of them, when we spotted a good place to stop for fuel. We got out, gassed up, and got back in. That’s when we discovered the problem! Both pieces of celery remained on the plate, but there was no cream cheese. No sign that cream cheese had ever touched either piece of celerery! What could have happened to that cream cheese?

The cat continues to sleep in his cat box.

The wind is blowing today. We heard it come up in the night. There is a conflict. We want to go straight south. The wind wants us to go straight east. We drove south through Stratford, the pheasant capitol of Texas, then Dumas, then Amarillo, and continued on toward Lubbock. We never made it to Lubbock. At Plainview, we conceded and let the wind have its way. I got tired of driving in the crosswind. We turned east. Plans change.

Plainview. It claims to be famous for its spectacular view of, guess what, the plains! Well, driving for hours across north Texas, could cause one to wonder: how did they pick this spot? How could this view of the plains be any different from any other view of the plains for a hundred miles in every direction? Our second unsolved mystery?

We went east a hundred miles, tailwind all the way, and stopped for the night at a state park called Copper Breaks. Another three hundred mile day. Nice place. Nice campsites(picture). A lake. Hiking trails. Friendly people. Seventy degrees. Birds. No wind. We’ll plan a new route tomorrow.

Oh how I love to leave before dawn, watch the sun come up, and the world come slowly back to life! It can be painful, though, driving straight east into a beautiful blue-sky morning. Beautiful as that sunrise is, the first hour can really wear you down.

Well that wasn’t a problem this trip. Happy New Year! Last night was New Year’s Eve. We stayed up late, slept late, and left late. We got a good weather forecast(picture). Looks just right for driving out east, then south to the Texas coast.

This is our first long relaxed trip in the freeway flyer. It is very comfortable and quiet at 70mph on smooth roads. It’s comfortable at 65mph on two lane highways as well. It is a little noisier inside though. I fear this rig would not survive the no-rattle standards of my brother Bill. I can hear the side-door screen. I hear a rattle from a little handle above my head, and I get a squeaking noise from the weather-stripping on the living-room slide. Judy taped the little handle shut and it got quiet. Then we crossed back onto smooth road and all the noises went away.

Stopped at a small city park in Hugo Colorado for lunch(picture). I like this town. Very small. Nice neighborhood. Empty wide streets. Neat yards. Chicken coops. And I ran past a very tame flock of wild turkeys. Fourteen of them. I got within twenty yards of the elusive wild turkey, and they never spooked. They just clucked and chuckled and opened a path for me. Marooned on the other side of the Burlington Northern rail line splitting the town, I stood and felt the rhythm as a hundred-car coal train rumbled past a few feet in front of me. Coal goes from west to east here. It doesn’t slow down for Hugo Colorado.

Annie jumped up into my lap today while I was driving! That’s the first time she has done that since the great air-horn honking incident in Michigan. I was careful to protect the horn button so she couldn’t hit it with her butt again while changing positions. Then, off we went through the old west. It had to be the old west by the names of the towns: Kit Carson, Cheyenne Wells, and Wild Horse.

Rags went though the usual cat-drugging for the first day out. He doesn’t get car sick if we do that. He laid on the rocker/recliner like he usually does, then Judy decided he should ride in his crate for awhile. He had disappeared from the chair behind us, so Judy went to look for him. She found him asleep in the cat box. Maybe he should stay confined until he is a little more coherent.

This is our first two-computer trip. We have Judy’s new GPS navigation system loaded on our newest fastest laptop computer. I’m still writing on the same laptop I have been using for the last two years. The navigator guided us flawlessly down highway 287, and out the bottom right corner of Colorado.

Drove a nice 300 mile day. Stopped in Boise City Oklahoma. Chili-dogs at the Dairy Queen at the edge of town for dinner. Huge parking lot. They offered us overnight parking. We went for it.

Here is the plan. We’ll drive south tomorrow to San Angelo, spend a couple days there exploring, then pop over to Sea Rim State Park, at the north end of the Texas gulf coast, right by Lousisiana. From there, we’ll work our way south along the coast to wherever we end up.

Great start to our trip.