Driving Day 5 - Amarillo to Clarksville, AR + Odds & Ends

Today we drove about 500 miles from Amarillo, TX to Clarksville, AR.  It was an uneventful drive so my blog today is odds and ends.  Several things have come to mind that I wanted to write in earlier posts, but they escaped me at the time.

New Mexico

- After we got to Santa Fe, we found out there is a commuter train that runs between Albuquerque and Santa Fe called the Rail Runner and costs about $7.  Once you're in Santa Fe, there is a free mini bus service called the Santa Fe Pickup that you can ride to get around town. A good thing to know for a future visit.

-  Another thing that fascinated us was watching severe rainstorms over the mountains while the area we were in was completely dry.

- We also enjoyed seeing the art along the freeways out of Albuquerque and the painted overpasses.  As we were leaving Albuquerque, there were two very large Indian pots along one median and a very large sterling silver aloe plant.

- Our tow truck driver Dennis asked the usual questions: where are you from, where are you going, etc.  He also asked when we left home and we said Sept 2.  Remember it was Sept 8 when we met him and he just gave us a funny look and said "what have y'all been doing".  When we told him that we'd drive to a destination on one day, spend a whole day at the destination, then take off on the third day.  That made sense to him.

- We saw lots of windmill farms outside of California.  Two I remember are atop the Plateau Mtns in NM east of Tucumcari and one along I-40 in Oklahoma between Clinton and Weatherford.  Some were close enough to the freeway, you could almost touch them.

Texas
We arrived in Amarillo at night so didn't see much of the landscape till this morning when we left - nothing spectacular.  One goofy thing we encountered was crossing the same two counties 3 different times - Gray and Donley Counties.  First we saw the sign for Gray County and about 5 or so miles later, we saw the sign for Donley County - then Gray, then Donley, then Gray, then Donley, then Gray.  They were all spaced a short distance apart - very odd.

Oklahoma
- Going past Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City we watched an AWAC plane heading off into the wild blue yonder.  My cousin Janet's husband Chuck was stationed at Tinker for a few years and flew on the AWAC planes.  It looked beautiful against the clouds and I tried to get a picture from the car, but no luck.

- Most of I-40 through Oklahoma was was being repaved which slowed us down a little bit.  We also encountered more traffic than we had since we left California, probably because of the construction zones.

-  Of course, we passed through a few Indian reservations.  The oddity was that we didn't see signs as we entered a reservation, but saw them saying that we were leaving.

- We passed over a very large lake called Lake Lotawatah - get the pun?  It was really the first sizeable body of water we've seen since Lake Havasu City.

-  The bead artist we met in Adrian, TX gave us a flyer for a place called Harley & Annabelle's in Erick, OK.  We got to that area just in time for a break so we went.  It was a very crazy place filled with lots of stuff.  Harley & Annabelle were there and they are characters - especially Harley.  Erick was also home to Roger Miller ("King of the Road") and a Roger Miller Museum was down the street.

Tomorrow we're headed to Memphis with a visit to Graceland.  We'll be back on track from our little setback and still plan to arrive in Troy, IL for a visit with my brother Tony and sister-in-law Sherry.  As always, check out our photos and stay tuned....