Traveling

It was a long trip to Oklahoma and back but we made it.  We chose to take the southern route (I-10) this time in lieu of our usual trip along I-40.  We thought this would give us a change of scenery and make the drive more enjoyable.  What the hell was I thinking?  The first thousand miles was unbroken desert!  The only change we noticed was in the type of cactus plants we could see.

We had pretty much decided not to return the same way, but a last minute snowstorm forced us to take the southern route home as well.  The 100 mile trip from Atoka, OK to Dallas, Tx was a site to behold and had I known how treacherous it was I would have waited out the snowstorm.  We saw no less then 100 vehicles that had spun out and were in ditches or worse.  Some of the accidents had happened during the night and the owners had left their vehicles stranded in the snow drifts, but many others had just recently occurred and the owners were still in their cars, many still had stunned looks on their faces indicating we had just missed the wild event.  About ten miles east of Dallas, we left all that behind and were in bright sunshine.

We have made this drive several times over the past couple of years, and each time we try to find variations on our route.  Once, we took a side trip to Roswell to see if we could spot any aliens.  We did not.  We did see the McDonald's restaurant that was built to look like a flying saucer.  How tacky is that!  On another trip, we went to see Santa Fe in New Mexico, one of the most historic places west of the Mississippi River.  From there we continued north to the artists community of Taos, NM, a very worthwhile place to visit, and then continued west through the painted desert and on to the Grand Canyon where he turned south again and rejoined the traffic on the I-40 for the remainder of the trip, Ho Hum.