Driving Through Texas

After a long day of racing through much of Texas to get to Amarillo in West Texas, we are on the road this morning, going a different route to Taos since the fire has shut down the road to Cimarron. No camping this time. We have a motel room reserved in Taos. Just passed a massive feed lot, cattle standing about causing a haze of dust and steam in the air. We started the morning with breakfast at Waffle House. My husband likes a hearty breakfast when we are traveling, not the yogurt and blackberry bread I had packed. Driving through Texas is both interesting and boring as far as the landscape is concerned. From about Lubbock to Amarillo the high plains of Texas are flat, yellow with dried grasses or plowed fields. But between San Antonio and Lubbock, you go through the Texas Hill Country, with rising hills, trees that grow shorter the further west you go. We stopped in Menard, Texas to visit the reconstructed ruins of the San Saba Presidio, originally built by the Spanish in 1751 to protect their mission. The Spanish had hoped to convert the Lipan Apaches to Christianity and to discover gold and silver. A nearby town is named El Dorado, a nod to that hope for gold. Of course, their hopes were not met, attacks by Comanche and Wichita Indians convinced the Spanish to abandon their plans for this, their furthest mission north in Texas. It was interesting to see the restoration efforts of 1937 and more recent ones, to imagine life in the 18th century in Texas. We enjoyed a picnic lunch at the site. We had originally planned to camp out at Lake Colorado City but with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees, we decided a cool motel would suit us better. We have camped at Lake Colorado City, not far from Sweetwater, before. It is a flat campground near the lake; I imagine that once summer really gets going that it is busy with campers and people enjoying the lake. But usually in early June when we have stayed, there have only been a few campers, making it quiet and peaceful. Rabbits abound and bound about the area, and birds come awake in the morning, singing their various songs. A morning stroll, a few cups of coffee for Wally—he likes his morning coffee—and then we are usually off and back on the road. But this time, it was a motel in Amarillo.

So, June 3, we are on the interstate going out of Amarillo and over to New Mexico. Semi-trucks line the highway, transporting goods across the nation. The land is flat and yellow, black cows, Angus, dot the fields, heads down as they graze. Wind turbines, their blades turning in some weird dance or ballet, huge monsters they grace or mar the landscape. Entrances to ranches greet the highway, the name of the ranch announced on a gateway arch and the long straight dirt road to the ranch disappearing over a hill, in the distance. In a land with few trees, a cluster of them surround the ranch house, the shade and windbreak on the plains.