Surprises in Texas

Get Well America Tour –

Amarillo, Palo Duro, Lake Perry Texas

January 22 – January 25, 2020

Amarillo sprawls like no other town or city I have seen. It has serious sprawling going on for miles and miles and miles and miles. There is room around buildings and roads and homes. People move about with a determined work a-day energy that I found comforting. And finally, Little Libraries! I hadn’t found any since I left Payton, Colorado. There are so many little towns without Little Libraries. What a shame!

The one thing that must be said about Texas, as obvious as it is, is that it is big and spread out and it’s easy to go 200 miles without seeing much more than flat brown land…flat as a pancake they say…and big blue skies. And then, just as you get to expecting that it will stay that way, it changes, just like it did in Palo Duro.

Just south Amarillo lies a canyon second only to the Grand Canyon. Palo Duro is awesome, beautiful, majestic and apparently relatively unknown to Texans as well as the rest of us. I made my way to one of the mostly empty campgrounds and parked for the night and marveled at the wonder, sunset to sunrise.

Just as the canyon appeared, it disappeared again into the pancake flat landscape as I headed toward Austin. It would be a two-day drive with a quick overnight stop at Brady Lake where I enjoyed a beautiful sunset and a pre-dawn departure with no cell or satellite service. This last piece proved to be a bit startling as I realized that I was unsure of my directions and I had no navigational services. What was I to do?

I laughed at myself as I realized that I had a paper map of Texas tucked away in the door pocket. It was the first time in over 12,000 miles of traveling that I needed a paper map – I was glad that I had it and glad that I knew how to read it.   It definitely took me back a few decades.

And look who I met…

And as promised, the topography changed as I neared Austin to hills and green vegetation. Somehow I had the idea that Austin, the capital of Texas, was a little hippy town like Boulder, Colorado. Not so at all – its big, sprawling and with fascinating neighborhoods and delicious food to explore.

Please, be kind to yourself first, then to others!

What’s your kind of quotient today?