BACKTRACKING TO TEXAS

It is now Thursday night in California and I am playing catch-up.  Wednesday afternoon I was I was able to solve my technical difficulties (after 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon) with the computer; however, I still didn’t have access because I was traveling through the desert and I only have a mobile stick.  So I decided to begin typing in Word do I could post later when I had access to the Internet.  So for now, I'm playing catch-up.

Wednesday, October 19 has come and gone.  I started these notes yesterday and am just now getting back to them, so my verb tenses will be past and present.  Sorry Mr. P.   We left the hotel at 6:50.  It was 42 degrees with a wind chill of 37.  The day is supposed to be sunny and eventually make its way to 70 degrees.  For now it’s a little windy and cold.

After a quick stop for gas and breakfast, we crossed into Texas at 6:58 (7:58 your time, just as classes were scheduled to start).  The Texas landscape is very different than that of North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas.  It is brown, very brown, rocky, flat, canyons, dirt, and sunken river beds.  The eastern landscape is blotched with shrubs and grassland.  There isn’t really green grass as we know it.  The further west we go, it becomes hillier, rockier, and you begin to see the Mesa.  These land masses protrude out of the landscape - rising up and flattening out. 

The Mesa

Sometimes these are covered with communications towers in order to again, send the signal across the land.   The landscape is scattered with old windmills, and with modern wind turbine farms.  For miles you see huge hay fields, large cotton fields, and cattle grazing. 

Texas Always Does it Big - Texas-sized haystack!

Ranches are big in this state and fence lines stretch for miles.  You see cattle grazing, some horses, but primarily cattle (at least in the east).  Houses are very far apart and are easily picked out on the landscape because you only have to look for the clumps of green.  The house and surrounding out buildings (garage, barns, grain silos, are usually nestled among some trees.  Yards are often fenced (to keep the roaming cows out) and these are often small areas. 

There are thousands of miles of fencing in the west, starting in Oklahoma and continuing through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.  You see fencing across the mountains, through the desert, and the towns.   We have asked ourselves on this trip, “Who owns it all?  Where does one property begin and one end?”

At the Texas Welcome Center, we learned about the BIGGEST ranch in Texas history.  It was the XIT Ranch.  The ranch was 3,000,000 acres and spread over ten counties.  It had 150,000 head of longhorn cattle, over 150 cowboys worked the ranch, and road 1,000 horses.  This ranch was the first to build the windmill for pumping water from the ground.  Visit the XIT Ranch to discover how many MILES of fencing there was on the property, how many windmills and dams were erected, how many calves were branded each year, and how many cows were driven annually to the northern pastures for grazing in preparation for the Chicago meat markets.  Also, find out, what is the largest ranch in Texas today and how many acres does the ranch cover?

Texas Welcome Center - Picnic Area

The Welcome Center in Texas was very interesting.  In addition to bathrooms, a critical need, they had picnic areas constructed to remind you of T-Pees.  There was as great display inside the center of historical information.  One interesting thing about this rest stop was that it was built into a hill, thus making this structure a Tornado shelter.  Something that is common to Texas and the West.  What is the name given to this area of the country where tornadoes often occur?

Dust Cloud Lubbock, Texas

As I said, Texas is brown and barren (dirt, no grass as you and I know grass).  On Monday night (while we were staying in Jackson, TN), we learned on the news that Lubbock, TX had a major dust storm.  On our drive through Texas on I-40, we passed 125 miles north of Lubbock as we went through Amarillo.   Dust storms were very common in the mid-1930s.  Ask Mr. P about the Dust Bowl Days.   According to people living in the area, this was the worst dust storm in decades.  A brownish, red wall of dust 8,000 feet high with winds of 70 mph swept through Lubbock at 5:30.   It made it look like night.  Would we have anything like that in Middleburg?  While this event is not something we experienced, it was close to the area through which we traveled and it is a phenomenon or happening that is different and unique to Texas and the west. 

We passed through Texas and entered New Mexico at 1025.  The temperature at that time was 75 degrees, a nice increase from the early morning temps.  I will leave you at the New Mexico border and pick you up tomorrow to continue our journey.