Day 83 - Is This The Way To Amarillo?
Trip Start
May 19, 2008
1
85
161
Trip End
Nov 08, 2008
Amarillo,
Texas,
United States
Saturday, August 9, 2008
The first stage of our journey to Tucumcari involved using a combination of the Interstate and wherever possible, the old Route 66 which runs parallel to it. Unfortunately the road surface isn't brilliant on the 66 and in some places there were huge puddles of mud and sand from the heavy rains of the last few days.
From Tucumcari we took state highway 209, which took us south briefly before turning directly east towards the Texan state line. The first part of the road took us through the "mesa lands" which provided some quite contrasting scenery to that of the last week or so on the road to Albuquerque and back
After-Effects Of The Heavy Rain
. Our final experience of the New Mexico landscape was that of flat agricultural land - lots of it! As we crossed the state line on a relatively minor road, there was no big "Welcome To Texas" sign. We only knew that we had crossed into Texas from the imaginatively named "State Line Road" that intersected the road that we were on! At this point we also crossed from the "Mountain Time Zone" to the "Central Time Zone", which means that we are now only 6 hours behind the UK and 7 hours behind Spain.
(We think we forgot to mention previously when we crossed into the "Mountain Time Zone" from the "Pacific Time Zone". Probably because we were quite confused by it ourselves! We should have put our watches forward an hour when we crossed from Nevada to Arizona, but Arizona doesn't subscribe to "daylight saving time" through summer which meant that the time stayed the same. Then in the middle of Arizona in the Navajo Nation, they do use daylight saving time so we were temporarily an hour in front. This lasted for two and a half days, then we left Navajo territory and went onto "standard" Arizona time, for all of 11 miles, before crossing into Utah and onto "Mountain Time" proper. Confused? We were! It took a couple of days before we were convinced that we had our watches set correctly!)
The scenery didn't change much for the first few miles of Texas, lots more agricultural land
Mesa Lands 1
. As we approached the town of Hereford it became more built up with some very nice houses indeed. Unlike the houses that we have seen so far on our journey, these had beautifully manicured lawns and not an abandoned vehicle in sight. The next 40-50 miles as we travelled north-east towards Amarillo, we passed through more agricultural land, however, here in Texas the farming, particularly of cattle seems much more intensive than we have previously seen. The closer we came to Amarillo and the more densely populated it became, until suddenly we were on the outskirts of the city faced with information overload. After a couple of weeks away from cities, it's quite overwhelming when you come back into one, particularly one the size of Amarillo.
The camp-site that we had selected from our guide proved to have closed down but the guy working at the motel that was open in it's place gave us vague directions to another one, which we found about 20 minutes later.
It's a nice site with an indoor pool and gym, and wi-fi so we will be able to get some blog uploaded at last. There's also a wedding taking place in the grounds of the camp-site
Mesa Lands 2
. Now we're all for civil ceremonies, but a camp-site? Oh well, whatever floats your boat and all that! After dinner, the storm that had been in the distance moved in on us. We gained some rain and lost our internet connection!
Miles travelled: 216
Total miles travelled: 7685
Days on road: 63
States visited: 12
National Parks visited: 11
