MAY 23, 2013 HEADING FOR ALASKA, EVENTUALLY

May 23, 2013    UP, UP AND AWAY….

It was a dark and stormy morning…..well, not really.  It WAS dark at 5:30AM,  and it was warm and muggy enough to make us glad that we would be heading to cooler climes…eventually.  Heavy fog to the north made for slow going for a while, and the day never would get clear until we reached our destination – Palo Duro Canyon, in west Texas.

We passed by towns like Buffalo, Ennis, Waxahatchie, Fort Worth and Wichita Falls.  West Texas looks like you’d expect, with cattle, horses, jack-up rigs, cacti, windmills, cotton fields,  irrigation equipment, mesquite and flat, flatter, flattest terrain.

 One thing that didn’t appear in those old westerns was the plethora of wildly spinning wind turbines.  The huge sky looked rather ominous at times.  We even passed a van marked “storm interceptor” but all we saw (and felt) was very heavy winds.

Spent a long time (we had lots!) talking and singing favorite road trip songs, as well as looking up some lists on-line… you’ll no doubt recognize a few.

We arrived at Palo Duro  (Hard Wood) Canyon just before 5:00.  Still very windy, but the sun came out as we neared and there were welcoming blue skies.  The Canyon is 120 miles long and 800 ft deep (second to the Grand Canyon in the US)  and quite amazing to anyone with even the slightest interest in history or geology.  Beautiful colors and strata.  The park we stayed at was at the end of a very steep and windy road, at the bottom of the canyon, where the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River still runs.  

  It was easy to picture the native Americans who lived here for years, and some remnants of ranches that followed them remain,  as well as many CCC projects.  Cell phone and internet have been intermittent at best.

The folks in the campsite next to us were also Roadtrekers, so we talked with them quite a bit.  They told us about a walk just behind our campsite and it was, though not “official”, quite lovely, especially as the setting sun caught the red bluffs.  

There were several visitors to our campsites …

WHAT I LEFT OUT:  Dust clouds, road construction, grasshoppers and  a windshield ding (and we were worried about Alaska roads!)

May 24, 2013  DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS…

We rose early thinking we would see sunrise, but being in a canyon the sun didn’t make an appearance till 7:30 or 8:00.   We walked the Paseo del Rio trail along the river, which included a cowboy dugout made of rock, mud and wood.

Returned to our campsite for breakfast and a shower at the park facilities (mine was hot, Greg’s was not). Then stopped at the Visitors’ Center/Museum/Shop before heading north to Amarillo.  After a quick repair to the windshield we visited a McDonalds to use their Wi-Fi, then headed north  and west, through the Texas panhandle, a little of the Oklahoma panhandle, and into Colorado.

The terrain was flat and pretty bleak where there wasn’t irrigation going on.  Cattle here and there but mostly rocky, scrubby flatland.  Even the mesquite soon disappeared.  At one point we stopped so I could take a picture of the empty roads and lands.  Very little traffic - wide open spaces and silence except for the wind.

I actually had to battle to get a steady picture because of the strong winds.   “Quiet desolation” came to mind. Bonnie Raitt and others cheered things up! There was often a lot of dust wherever there wasn’t vegetation.  We pitied the motorcyclists!

After an  hour or so into Colorado, things began to get green and we saw herds of antelope,(they really were playing, or at least chasing each other LOOKED like playing to us) as well as cattle and farmland.  Still alot of wind and dust. Ended the day at a Flying J near the Denver airport.

WHAT I LEFT OUT:  Insurance sent us to a shop that couldn’t do the repair, but that shop sent us to another Toot ‘n Totum (really) that fixed us up.   The dust was awful. McDonalds internet was sooo slow – 10 minutes to upload one photo so we gave up.