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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

February 19, 2005 - Driving East through New Mexico and Texas Panhandle.

Our goal was to get as far east as possible, so we had a quick breakfast of oatmeal and then hooked up the trailer for the trip. When Monika went to the office to return the 50-amp to 30-amp converter cable, however, she couldn't find the proprietor anywhere around. I had put a $20 deposit on the adapter, so that left me with the question of whether I should just take it with and call it even, or leave it in front of their door and be out my $20. Since I really didn't have any use for the adapter, we left it there, which meant our 3-night stay had actually cost us a total of $95. Considering that this mobile home park had no toilets, showers, laundries or any other type of normal RV amenity, we found this all a bit irritating. Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, "Never have so few paid so much for so little!"

In any case we were out on the road by about 8:30 and drove steadily west on Interstate 40 through New Mexico and the Texas panhandle for the rest of the day. The scenery was, for the most part, a flat high-altitude plateau with mesas visible off in the distance. The air was perfectly clear and the visibility was horizon-to-horizon. We saw a tremendous change in the ecology of the areas we drove through that seemed to be strongly related to the altitude. Albuquerque was around 5,000 feet and was a desert with sagebrush and some straggling grass. We found anyplace below about 6000 feet altitude had that type of arid appearance.

Above 6000 feet, however, the ecology shifted over to medium sized bushes and grass with very little if any sagebrush. Those bushes might or might not have actually been some kind of tree like a small juniper or cedar of some kind, but I wasn't certain. Around 7000 feet, we saw real, straight-up-in-the-air trees were growing, at least in patches on the sides and tops of mesas and so forth. Most often we saw what looked like Ponderosa Pines, but at least once we also saw a deciduous stand of trees.

At the higher elevations the fairly lush growth of trees, bushes, and grasses appeared to me like it would support grazing fairly well. The land was always fenced in with barbed wire, but I never spotted any cattle in those high altitude areas. As we gradually descended back down to 5000 and then to 4000 feet in the Texas panhandle, we started to see irrigated fields with what looked like alfalfa, corn, and cotton crops. Some of that area also had grazing herds of cattle, occasionally grazing in the harvested fields among the remains of last years crop! I didn't know that cattle could eat cotton plants and thrive on it, but there they were.

We developed a new game to play along the road to help while the time away. I noticed long ago that trucks signal when it's OK for another truck to pull in front of them by the rear truck blinking its headlights. So when a truck passed us, we would signal when they were clear of us by blinking our lights at them. What we were hoping for was a "thank you" blink of their taillights after they had pulled in front of us. If the truck did the "thank you" blink, we counted that as one point for whoever was driving. I ended up with 21 points for the day and Monika had 12, not that I was keeping score or anything.

Although I triumphed at the truck blinking game, I lost miserably at the "transmission killing" game. That is the game that gives the driver a point if the transmission goes into one of its big downshifts where the engine starts roaring over 3,000 rpm. A point is, of course, a bad thing as it means the driver has put a lot of wear and tear on the transmission, so the person who gets the most points gets the "transmission killer" award of the day. I ended up with 2 TK points to Monika's 0, so I got the "transmission killer" award with an extra bar for the day. How embarrassing. By the end of the day we were near Shamrock, Texas, and we called it quits at an RV park just to the west of town. They had, thank goodness, toilets, showers, and even a small selection of groceries for $21 a night, which was a considerably better deal than we had in Albuquerque! We left the truck hitched to the trailer for a quick getaway in the morning and just put down the stabilizers and connected the water and electric power. After a few sandwiches for supper we took some pictures of the sunset over the prairie and settled in for an evening of working on our computers.

I finally finished stitching together all the panoramic photographs of the Grand Canyon and updated the journal. Monika kept plugging away at doing final processing of all our pictures and selecting the best ones that fit with the journal entries.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 05
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February 2005
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8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
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