January 21, 2005 - Drive to Midland, Texas

Being in no hurry at all to tow a trailer through Dallas morning rush hour traffic, we slept in and took our sweet time about clearing the trailer for traveling and hooking it up. I used the extra time outside to check on all the tire pressures and re-tighten the lug nuts on the trailer wheels. We also took the time to dump the wastewater tanks and as a result we didn't leave the campground until shortly after 10 a.m., a rather late start for us. We cut across to Interstate 35 west on a 2-lane county road, which was slow going but too far north to be involved in rush hour traffic. Taking I-35 to the ring road around Fort Worth, just to the west of Dallas, we followed it to the southwest before branching off on Interstate 30 in order to join Interstate 20 west.

For the next 6 hours we trundled slowly across a large swathe of central Texas. The landscape was mostly scrub forest and pastureland until Abilene, where we saw some quite large cotton fields being harvested. The harvested cotton is put on the field roughly in the shape of a huge brick maybe 6 feet high by 4 feet wide by 10 feet long or so. Those bricks must be trucked directly to the transshipment yards by the railroad we saw shortly thereafter, because I saw the bricks next to the tracks and there was no sign of the old-fashioned cotton bales anywhere.

However, the land seemed to be getting progressively drier the further west we traveled, and shortly after Abilene the farming ceased all together. But a little further south we were surprised to see windmill farms on the tops of the ridges south of us. We drove past two very large installations, and we estimated 50 or more at the first one and somewhat fewer at the second. Clearly a large investment in wind power had been made by some corporation, and it seemed at least moderately successful as there were high voltage power lines leading from these installations off into the distance.

We also had one of those "What the heck?" experiences that happen every so often while driving. Usually, we see something on the roadside or a truck carrying something really weird and we say, "What the heck is that?" In this case I saw a truck with a flatbed trailer upon which was an old airplane fuselage with "United States of America" painted on it. It was about big enough to be a DC-3 and the paint job made it look like it might have been an Air Force 1 or 2 aircraft back in the 1950s, but if so, what was it doing being trucked about in the middle of Texas?

Similarly another "What the heck?" experience occurred couple of days back when we drove from Austin to Dallas. We saw a guy hanging from a paraplane chute off in the distance. Since he didn't descend like a normal parachute, we could only surmise that he was wearing one of those engine and propeller units on his back and flying the thing. But why do that when the sun is setting? I would think landing one of those at night would be just as dangerous if not more dangerous than landing a regular aircraft, especially when you consider that the landing gear for the parachute is your feet!

Anyway, as we were heading west Monika found a couple of Volksmarches in Midland, Texas, and I recalled that the Confederate Air Force was headquartered there, so we decided to make that our next destination. Midland was also about the right distance from Dallas as we arrived around 5:30 after driving a bit over 7 hours, which is enough for one day. I also found it much nicer to unhitch and set things up while it was still light, and since we were on the western edge of the Central Time Zone the sunset didn't happen until shortly after 6 p.m. We had our typical light dinner of sandwiches and settled down for some writing and picture processing on our respective computers.

I was happy that the panoramic pictures I had been making seemed to be successfully stitched together by the Camedia software. The software was, as I had found out much to my chagrin, quite finicky about the order in which I took the pictures. I had to take horizontal panoramic sequences from left to right or it wouldn't work, and similarly the up-and-down panoramic sequences had to be taken from top to bottom. After a lifetime working with, and sometimes against, computers, there is nothing I detest more than unreasonably finicky software. However, I had to admit that the program did the stitching process very well and the final effect of these panoramic shots was quite striking.