Travlin’ Shoes

The following is a travelogue of our trip from northern New Mexico to southern Louisiana. I can’t help but write down my observations, and apparently I can’t help sending them to you, but it won’t hurt my feelings if you skim through, overlook or blatantly dump them. This is a lot like looking at someone else’s slides ….

11-30-07

South of Lubbock, Texas, we pass rich, red fields of cotton, many fields not yet harvested. The cotton plants have been sprayed to defoliate them, so the plants are just white, puffy balls on brown sticks. What’s left over after harvest blows around, littering the side of the road like kleenex.

Cotton is planted in two rows close together, with a wide space on either side for the cotton picking machine. It just takes the bolls and leaves the bare branches. A couple of years ago we went through a cotton museum in
Georgia, but this is the first time we’ve seen such expansive fields at harvest time.

Texas highways are clean and well maintained. We see trains carrying crude oil and more trucks than we can count. Forty miles south of Lubbock we see the first oil wells, some of them pumping in the middle of a cotton field. The smell is right now and not real good. The smell of money, I guess.

Sweetwater, Texas, home of the world’s largest rattlesnake round up. The last 100 miles have been solid cotton fields. There are also miles of wind farms. The 3-prop wind turbines are huge; some are near the highway and we can see how they dwarf a pickup. Most of the wind farms are, of course, up along the mesas.

12-1-07

We stayed at a park on Brownwood Lake, outside Brownwood, Texas. The Woodall’s RV Park Directory says “some seasonals.” Out of 41 spaces, there were four spots available. The others were full, and empty of people! Some days a good deal of the adventure is in just finding a place to stay. And we’re getting into country where there really are seasonals.

We pass through so many little towns with rusted tin store fronts and weedy yards: Zephyr, Early, and Mullin, Texas, pop 175, home of the Bulldogs. Towns of any size usually have a Brown Barn on the highway, a drive through likker store. The billboards are wonderful: “Attention hunters! Ask about our happy water and gift sets!”
Lots of signs out for deer corn. We got the story on hunting in Texas a couple of years ago when we were in San Antonio. Hunters use a 15 to 20 foot tripod with a platform and cammo blind on top. A feed spreader shoots out
corn kernels every so many minutes and when the deer come to eat you shoot them. Some sport.

This country seems to be big on “Blood Boers” and show goats. Hwy. 184 South is 4-lane, except where it’s 2-lane, and then the shoulder is so wide the locals use it as a granny lane.

We’re on the Brazos Trail from Austin to Houston. Oaks are bigger here, with lots of cedar and pecan trees. Seventy-five degrees at 3 p.m. We have been without our own computer service since we left Bernalillo. Verizon called some time ago and offered to upgrade our plug-in card that gives us such good service almost anywhere. Dave distinctly asked the rep if we would have any problems with it, traveling the way we do. No, no, she assured us. Well, we don’t have any problem with it, but we had to get into a Verizon area to activate it, and Austin was the first place that was possible. Wuh.

At Ledbetter, Texas, we stopped at Stuemer’s Store, operated by the Stuemers since 1891 (and the woman behind the counter just might have been one of the original Stuemers). Also in the store were six guys wearing shirts that said “Austin Christian Bass Club.” Dave said to one of them, “What do you do if you catch a bass that isn’t a Christian?” The guy said they only catch Christian bass but he allowed as how this is the first time he’s ever been asked that question.

We spent last night in Brenham, Texas, halfway between Austin and Houston. Traveling is exhausting for me. I’ve got about one more day in me. The smells here are smells of the South. Wet earth, faded roses, standing water and smoke from the barbecue probably three miles away. Those are the outdoor smells. Indoors you have to add the odor of the bath mat that won’t dry until we head back west. I notice the guy behind us has put some kind of an animal hide outside his trailer (I didn’t count that in the outdoor smells), and a vulture is braced in the dirt, struggling mightily to pull some strips off it. Some places are classier than others.

A couple from Massachusetts pulled in next to us last night, and the guy got out and was hooking up at the same time Dave was. “Whew,” he said, “It’s good to be some place.” It amused me because I know he wasn’t sure where he was. We have felt that way many nights. It’s the little things that distinguish one park from another. Too bad he missed that vulture.

Driving through Atlanta pales in comparison to driving through Houston, Texas. With over two million people, Houston is undoubtedly the largest city we have driven through. We always look to take a ring road, or loop, to
bypass a major city, and we did it here, but the outside loop road was busy and in worse repair than I-10. It took us 1-1/2 hours to drive through the city. And this was on a Sunday!

So here we are, up to date, in Sulphur, LA. We are only about 250 miles from our destination, Biloxi, MS, but are going to lay up for at least a day. We need to finish up the paperwork for our last two jobs, now that we have a computer. We did well on sales for Santa Rosa, but still hope Biloxi is not a dud. Four out of our last five jobs have been less than sterling.

For you trivia buffs, I-10 has 880 exits in Texas. The highway seems to have been completely repaired from the Katrina and Rita damage. Tomorrow we are going another 75 miles down the road to New Iberia, This little bayou town is featured in one of our favorite writer’s novels and we want to hang out a day there. I promise I won’t write again for a while.

Love,