When the fog lifted and I saw the landscape, I almost cried. The change in scenery was that dramatic. Along the side of the road, there were a handful of red ravines cutting through the taupe earth. The desert, dotted with sage brush, stretched for miles on both sides of the road. To the west, red and brown mesas framed the setting sun and slightly to east, ahead in the distance stood Tucumcari Mt.
Today I covered a lot of ground. I drove from Austin, TX to Tucumcari, NM. It took me between nine and ten hours. I covered about 550 miles – almost all of it in Texas.
I’m still not fond of Texas, and I especially don’t like their roads. It’s cool that the speed limit is 75, but quite a few of the roads are junky with grooves and dips in them that aren’t great at 75 mph. They have a lot of frontage roads that run parallel with the main road which screws up google maps / gps. They don’t always have adequate signage (in the cities and in the country). At one point at least a half-dozen cars, myself included, missed the on-ramp to a highway because they were doing construction and hadn’t closed off the old on-ramp (or something like that). There also seems to be no planning/structure to anything. At times, some of the towns and grain elevators seemed like they had just been plunked down in the middle of nowhere. Certain places looked and felt like construction sites that someone forgot to clean up.
Part of my trip took me close to Lubbock, TX. I have no idea what the city of Lubbock (downtown) is like, but the outskirts that I drove through were… ugly. It smelled of oil, there were oil pumps scattered everywhere, pumping away. It, too, felt like haphazard industrial waste had been dumped everywhere as pumps and rail lines and silos were built.
Aside from the magical moment towards the end of my trip, most of my drive was split between driving by massive ranches and driving through thick fog. The Ranches stretch to the horizon – and as I drove past, it was hard not to think about how all of that land was acquired. It’s almost obscene to drive through so much territory – all of it fenced off. The fog part of the trip was unreal. For about 300 miles stretching from Sweetwater, TX up through Lubbock and into Quay, NM, the fog was heavy and mixed with light rain. It was thick enough that the sensors on my car couldn’t see through it. It was thick enough that I could barely see the massive windmills near the side of the road. I’ve driven through fog plenty of times. It’s never been for much more than a half hour. This fog lasted for about four hours of my trip.
I’m looking forward to clearer skies tomorrow and seeing the colors in the light of day. I’m hoping the weather won’t be too much of an issue these next few days. It’s currently 33 degrees with strong winds and a real feel of 21 degrees. They’re calling for a little snow tomorrow night. As long as it’s not foggy and I’m not on a Texas highway, it’ll be fine.