Santa Fe to home via US50
(posted from home)
(This post covers 22 – 27 April, 2010)
-------------------------------
Tuesday, 27 April-
Today we cleaned out the van and took care of the normal re-entry-after-vacation tasks. We picked up the mail and buzzed through it to be sure we didn't have any missed bills or important notices. Labashi went grocery shopping and I took care of checking out the vehicles and setting up a round of battery-charging for the vehicles which haven't moved in the last month. It's not raining today, so that's a welcome change after the last few days of never-ending rain.
It's also wonderful to see all the greenery around here. We completely missed Labashi's daffodils this year, however. The shoots were just poking up through the ground when we left and today I see there's just one sad-looking bloom left. I suppose that's a small price to pay for the privilege of seeing the deserts in bloom, though.
We spent the evening watching a PBS documentary about the major economic theories and their failings in accurately modeling market behaviors (as revealed by the 2008 financial crisis).
-------------------------------
Monday, 26 April-
This morning we awoke to --- wait for it---- even MORE rain.
After breakfast we elected to go off of Route 50 and head for I-70 and the PA Turnpike rather than wind through West Virginia's hills in the rain.
We spent the morning working our way toward the Cabela's at Wheeling, WV. Labashi had expressed interest in an LL-Bean-style moc-boot and we had struck out in our search for them at Bass Pro and Gander Mountain stores we'd encounter on our trip. I bought a cool 175-lumen LED flashlight and a box of CR123 batteries. Labashi did find some shoes she liked but the moc-boots rubbed her ankle so we struck out again.
We were happy to reach the Turnpike and beeline for home. We finally exited the turnpike at 1800 and stopped for supper at the nearby Hillside restaurant.
I'm happy to report we found nothing wrong at home. Our internet connection worked right away but I did have to call to get the cable TV connection working--- it apparently times out when I have the cable-box powered down for such a long period.
We spent the evening catching up on email and web news and for some reason weren't sleepy until almost midnight.
-------------------------------
Sunday, 25 April-
This morning we awoke once again to the promise of a day-long drive in rain. The night had been very windy and we had had to park the van near the Wal-mart to cut down the rocking of the van by gusts and fortunately that worked well. It seems odd to have so much rain when we had almost none for more than a month. We had hit one short rainstorm on I-8 in San Diego but that didn't even last twenty minutes. That was it!
Today Route 50 took us across the remainder of Illinois and into Ohio. It's still a good road though not as open as Kansas and Missouri. The small towns are a kick. There are many 'twirly-top' ice-cream parlors and 'tourist court'-style motels, so many, in fact, that we kept commenting on how it felt like we had gone back in time. We saw many, many older cars and lots of farm equipment.
After our long day we had chicken quesadillas at a Taco Bell for supper, then drove on to the Wal-mart at Athens, OH for the night. There we rented 'The Informant' with Matt Damon. This one seemed entertaining for awhile, then got complicated and I believe it lost us. In any case, we have to do some more reading about this one.
--------------------------------
Saturday, 24 April-
Last night after I finished blogging for the evening we were treated to quite a light show. As I was sitting in the passenger seat working away on the laptop, I noticed a flash of light in the distance. I stepped out of the van and noticed a half-moon and fluffy-white clouds overhead and a few flashes of light in the far distance. After a minute, I went back into the van.
About 20 minutes later I noticed the flashes of lightning were much closer now. I again stepped out and now the sky above us was black with roiling clouds and we had cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts every ten seconds or so.
Oddly, there was no thunder. We had a fresh wind rustling through the nearby trees and the wind swung around to the south about 20 degrees but otherwise, we had no indication of a passing storm other than the vivid, but silent lightning flashes, now filling the eastern hemisphere of the sky.
We sat in the van watching the lightning show for another half-hour. The main part of the storm passed off to our east though we could still see lightning far to the south. It must have been a massive storm to cover that much sky.
After breakfast we got back on the road. For this trip home we're following US50 and it has been a delight. For the most part, we can do 65 miles per hour through very open farmland, then have to slow to 45 through a village, but those are small. We have no truck traffic to speak of and in fact not much traffic of any kind. It's quite nice.
We love seeing the changes in the landscape. As we started across Kansas our path led through massive, rolling pastures with many cattle. This is very much a Western landscape but it's a bit confusing to the eye-- it's just way too green to represent the West. But there are the same corrals and windmill-fed watering tanks and rodeo notices and tack shops (and pickups!) as Out West.
As we made our way across Kansas the pastures became smaller and had fewer volcanic outcroppings. Yet when we entered Missouri, we had much the same impression-- this is more like the West than the East.
Though we enjoyed the drive for the landscape, we did have a problem. It had begun raining lightly and now there was just no letting up. I became frustrated with the ever-skipping windshield wipers and stopped to apply some Rain-X. That normally works but this time it's not working, perhaps because the wiper blade was replaced on the last inspection cycle.
By mid-afternoon we started seeing more crowded roads. That turned kind of ridiculous at Lake of the Ozarks where traffic was very heavy as we wound around and past the lake in a heavy rain. We just kept plugging along and eventually circled around the south side of St. Louis. We were close enough to see the Gateway Arch but were surprised how empty the roads were here on the south side.
As sunset approached we found a Lone Star restaurant for a supper break. When we're in a making-miles frame of mind we like to take a supper break, then press on for another few hours of driving.
Today we found our Wal-mart for the night at Carlyle, Illinois. We didn't get in until 2000 but still elected to rent a movie from the Redbox. Tonight it was 'Up In The Air' with George Clooney. We liked it as we were watching it but thought it had a problem-- it didn't know how to bring the plotline to an end.
--------------------------------
Friday, 23 April-
We had some blustery winds last night but they weren't strong enough to cause us a problem. We'd get the occasional shake of the van but it was light enough that we could sleep through them. I woke about 0300, however, and couldn't get back to sleep for several hours. Labashi was similarly affected and this time we couldn't blame it one the flight of tequilas. We resolved our problem by reading. Labashi is reading 'Tikal', a novel about the Mayan culture along the Guatemalan border. I'm reading 'Flashback', a Nevada Barr mystery novel sited in Dry Tortugas National Park, some 70 miles off the coast of Florida.
Despite the late-night reading we woke around 0700 but we were so close to the Pacific-Mountain Time Zone border that for all intents and purposes it was 0800.
We drove into Clayton (NM) where I noticed an office of the Kiowa National Grasslands as I drove by. We turned back, hoping to find info on where we could visit a grasslands visitor center. As it turns out, this was it!
I spent a very pleasurable half-hour talking with Tom Mc___ about the grasslands. The grasslands they manage consist of parcels spread across 200 miles of high plains, stretching from the panhandle of Texas, across the panhandle of Oklahoma, and into northern New Mexico. The grasslands in many cases are lands which were turned back to the government during the Dust Bowl. They are managed for cattle grazing. The current price for grazing is $1.35 per AMU or animal-month-unit. In other words, the 'permittee' pays the government $1.35 per month for each animal grazing these federal lands. Tom says the rate is set by Congress and he obviously thinks it's too cheap.
Each rancher who wishes to lease grazing lands must come to the table with a ranch of at least 160 acres. And he/she must pay for any improvements to the grazing lands. Improvements must be approved by the government managers of the grasslands and in return the permittee is given credits toward his/her bill. The system tends to keep the same parcels assigned to the same ranchers year after year. If a rancher sells his/her 160-acre base parcel, the permit rights of any leased lands are generally recommended to the government to be assigned to the new owner.
When I mentioned that we had learned that the assumed acreage needed per cow in western New Mexico is 40 acres per cow, Tom said they use the same figure here. So it's not difficult to see that homesteaders who qualified for a 160-acre parcel had only enough land for four cows while back east, a 160-acre parcel would support 160 cows.
I noticed that some proscribed burning is done according to pictures posted on the board. Tom said that's generally done for noxious or invasive weed control though it does tend to be good for a parcel. He also said that a parcel must be 'rested' at least 60 days during the grazing season. This is done by dividing the parcels into pastures and moving the cattle from pasture to pasture to both avoid over-grazing the stubble to shorter-than-acceptable lengths and providing the rest period.
I asked Tom how a permittee might lose his permit rights and he said it would generally have to be something serious like permitting animals on the land outside of the proscribed grazing season or allowing cattle to eat the stubble too low.
The other interesting thing we learned from Tom was there had been a tornado a mile wide in Kansas last night!
We continued driving northeast and shortly crossed into Oklahoma. We weren't far from the Texas border either. This particular panhandle area of Oklahoma was once called 'No Man's Land' and is only about 35 miles wide. We drove through it in short order, noticing that already the grasses were getting greener and thicker.
We crossed into Kansas along the old Santa Fe Trail and had lunch at a McDonald's (our first Mickey-D stop for the trip) and then continued on to Dodge City. We talked for a half-hour or so with the visitor center women at Dodge City and learned that the two large beef-cattle operations east of town process some 10,000 head of cattle a day.
We turned more easterly now out of Dodge City and soon arrived in Greenburg, the site of the 2007 tornado which wiped out the city. There's still plenty of evidence of the tornado but we were surprised to not find a visitor's center. It appears the work is still concentrating on getting the city back to normal. The hospital opened recently and the new high school will open for the next school year.
Since we couldn't find a visitor's center we stopped at the Big Well Gift Shop. The Big Well had been one of Greenburg's claims to fame--- the world's largest and deepest hand-dug water well. We spoke with Helen Shrader, who had lived through the tornado crouched in the hallway of her home a few blocks away. She says her home is now in the landfill.
After Greenburg we continued East in the stronger-and-stronger winds. The winds were only supposed to be gusting to around 40 miles per hour but they were dead across our path. We could see oncoming tractor-trailers and larger Rvs leaning precariously into our lane. And when we passed a wind-break of some sort, Mocha Joe would suddenly dart to the right, then be thrown back left once past the wind-break.
We stopped in Witchita at the Wal-mart and Sam's Club to see if we could find a hidey-hole for the night but they were completely open to the wind so we moved on. Finally, at El Dorado State Park, east of the city, we found a campsite with some shielding by trees. Also, by that time (1900 or so), the winds were dying down a bit, making our site more comfortable.
We spent the evening blogging and reading and before dark I took a short walk along the El Dorado Reservoir.
-------------------------------
Thursday, 22 April-
In the night we had a bit of wind and some sleet and today was supposed to be quite a bit colder than yesterday.
We left Santa Fe this morning. We chose the High Road to Taos for our departure and that turned out to be a great choice. The route took us as up to 9000 feet as it rambled through the pine-covered mountains. As we drove we started noticing snow on the oncoming cars and soon we hit fresh snow in the mountain towns. The roads were clear but the light covering of snow was very pretty on the ponderosa pines in the bright sunlight.
In Taos we did a bit of shopping for supplies and took a turn through the visitor parking lot at Taos Pueblo. We had been there years before and today was colder and very muddy so we didn't stay.
We had been at Acoma Pueblo last Fall and had a tour and we know that Taos Pueblo doesn't normally do tours anyway so we didn't feel we'd miss anything but the many vendors and we had seen many vendors on the Plaza in Santa Fe.
We crossed the mountains to Angel Fire, an upscale skiiing and golfing resort. We enjoyed seeing the mountain valley and Eagle Nest Lake, then descending through Cimarron Canyon to the town of Cimarron. There we visited the Philmont Scout Ranch, a place I've wanted to see since I was a Boy Scout (in the Sixties!) We toured the museum and research library and then the Trading Post.
We then continued out Route 64 toward the extreme northeast corner of New Mexico. After passing through Raton we noticed the wind had shifted and it soon became very strong and on-the-nose. At one point we got out of the van at a rest area and had trouble closing the doors. As Labashi tried to re-enter the van, her longish hair blew straight up and nearly caught in the door as it slammed shut. That would have hurt!
As we drove on we could see the dark, low, rolling clouds of a fast-moving squall line to the north of us. We learned from our weather radio that the front was moving north-northwest and we were driving east and could see the end of the squall line. Sure enough some 35 miles later the wind had subsided quite a bit and we had clearer sky ahead. By the time we reached Clayton, it appeared we were past it.
At Clayton we turned back to the northwest toward Clayton Lake State Recreation Area for our campsite for the night. As the sunset came the sky cleared and we had a beautiful sun on the lake.
After supper we read and blogged and planned our route for the next few days.
Our drive today was also very interesting for its dramatic changes in scenery. We left the high desert of Santa Fe and crossed the New Mexico Rockies to Cimarron. Coming out of Cimarron Canyon, we had a sudden change from mountain pines to high plains. In fact, Cimarron's motto is “Where the Rockies Meet the Plains!”.
Northeast of Cimarron we saw massive ranches with a few beef cattle spread widely about. But on the drive from Raton to Clayton we crossed from The West to The East (OK, the MidWest). The sparse, dry, yellow, sprinkled-with-chollas vegetation of Cimarron changed to green, grassy, smaller ranches with herds of cattle. Very interesting changes for so short a distance.
************* END OF POST ***********
(posted from home)
(This post covers 22 – 27 April, 2010)
-------------------------------
Tuesday, 27 April-
Today we cleaned out the van and took care of the normal re-entry-after-vacation tasks. We picked up the mail and buzzed through it to be sure we didn't have any missed bills or important notices. Labashi went grocery shopping and I took care of checking out the vehicles and setting up a round of battery-charging for the vehicles which haven't moved in the last month. It's not raining today, so that's a welcome change after the last few days of never-ending rain.
It's also wonderful to see all the greenery around here. We completely missed Labashi's daffodils this year, however. The shoots were just poking up through the ground when we left and today I see there's just one sad-looking bloom left. I suppose that's a small price to pay for the privilege of seeing the deserts in bloom, though.
We spent the evening watching a PBS documentary about the major economic theories and their failings in accurately modeling market behaviors (as revealed by the 2008 financial crisis).
-------------------------------
Monday, 26 April-
This morning we awoke to --- wait for it---- even MORE rain.
After breakfast we elected to go off of Route 50 and head for I-70 and the PA Turnpike rather than wind through West Virginia's hills in the rain.
We spent the morning working our way toward the Cabela's at Wheeling, WV. Labashi had expressed interest in an LL-Bean-style moc-boot and we had struck out in our search for them at Bass Pro and Gander Mountain stores we'd encounter on our trip. I bought a cool 175-lumen LED flashlight and a box of CR123 batteries. Labashi did find some shoes she liked but the moc-boots rubbed her ankle so we struck out again.
We were happy to reach the Turnpike and beeline for home. We finally exited the turnpike at 1800 and stopped for supper at the nearby Hillside restaurant.
I'm happy to report we found nothing wrong at home. Our internet connection worked right away but I did have to call to get the cable TV connection working--- it apparently times out when I have the cable-box powered down for such a long period.
We spent the evening catching up on email and web news and for some reason weren't sleepy until almost midnight.
-------------------------------
Sunday, 25 April-
This morning we awoke once again to the promise of a day-long drive in rain. The night had been very windy and we had had to park the van near the Wal-mart to cut down the rocking of the van by gusts and fortunately that worked well. It seems odd to have so much rain when we had almost none for more than a month. We had hit one short rainstorm on I-8 in San Diego but that didn't even last twenty minutes. That was it!
Today Route 50 took us across the remainder of Illinois and into Ohio. It's still a good road though not as open as Kansas and Missouri. The small towns are a kick. There are many 'twirly-top' ice-cream parlors and 'tourist court'-style motels, so many, in fact, that we kept commenting on how it felt like we had gone back in time. We saw many, many older cars and lots of farm equipment.
After our long day we had chicken quesadillas at a Taco Bell for supper, then drove on to the Wal-mart at Athens, OH for the night. There we rented 'The Informant' with Matt Damon. This one seemed entertaining for awhile, then got complicated and I believe it lost us. In any case, we have to do some more reading about this one.
--------------------------------
Saturday, 24 April-
Last night after I finished blogging for the evening we were treated to quite a light show. As I was sitting in the passenger seat working away on the laptop, I noticed a flash of light in the distance. I stepped out of the van and noticed a half-moon and fluffy-white clouds overhead and a few flashes of light in the far distance. After a minute, I went back into the van.
About 20 minutes later I noticed the flashes of lightning were much closer now. I again stepped out and now the sky above us was black with roiling clouds and we had cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts every ten seconds or so.
Oddly, there was no thunder. We had a fresh wind rustling through the nearby trees and the wind swung around to the south about 20 degrees but otherwise, we had no indication of a passing storm other than the vivid, but silent lightning flashes, now filling the eastern hemisphere of the sky.
We sat in the van watching the lightning show for another half-hour. The main part of the storm passed off to our east though we could still see lightning far to the south. It must have been a massive storm to cover that much sky.
After breakfast we got back on the road. For this trip home we're following US50 and it has been a delight. For the most part, we can do 65 miles per hour through very open farmland, then have to slow to 45 through a village, but those are small. We have no truck traffic to speak of and in fact not much traffic of any kind. It's quite nice.
We love seeing the changes in the landscape. As we started across Kansas our path led through massive, rolling pastures with many cattle. This is very much a Western landscape but it's a bit confusing to the eye-- it's just way too green to represent the West. But there are the same corrals and windmill-fed watering tanks and rodeo notices and tack shops (and pickups!) as Out West.
As we made our way across Kansas the pastures became smaller and had fewer volcanic outcroppings. Yet when we entered Missouri, we had much the same impression-- this is more like the West than the East.
Though we enjoyed the drive for the landscape, we did have a problem. It had begun raining lightly and now there was just no letting up. I became frustrated with the ever-skipping windshield wipers and stopped to apply some Rain-X. That normally works but this time it's not working, perhaps because the wiper blade was replaced on the last inspection cycle.
By mid-afternoon we started seeing more crowded roads. That turned kind of ridiculous at Lake of the Ozarks where traffic was very heavy as we wound around and past the lake in a heavy rain. We just kept plugging along and eventually circled around the south side of St. Louis. We were close enough to see the Gateway Arch but were surprised how empty the roads were here on the south side.
As sunset approached we found a Lone Star restaurant for a supper break. When we're in a making-miles frame of mind we like to take a supper break, then press on for another few hours of driving.
Today we found our Wal-mart for the night at Carlyle, Illinois. We didn't get in until 2000 but still elected to rent a movie from the Redbox. Tonight it was 'Up In The Air' with George Clooney. We liked it as we were watching it but thought it had a problem-- it didn't know how to bring the plotline to an end.
--------------------------------
Friday, 23 April-
We had some blustery winds last night but they weren't strong enough to cause us a problem. We'd get the occasional shake of the van but it was light enough that we could sleep through them. I woke about 0300, however, and couldn't get back to sleep for several hours. Labashi was similarly affected and this time we couldn't blame it one the flight of tequilas. We resolved our problem by reading. Labashi is reading 'Tikal', a novel about the Mayan culture along the Guatemalan border. I'm reading 'Flashback', a Nevada Barr mystery novel sited in Dry Tortugas National Park, some 70 miles off the coast of Florida.
Despite the late-night reading we woke around 0700 but we were so close to the Pacific-Mountain Time Zone border that for all intents and purposes it was 0800.
We drove into Clayton (NM) where I noticed an office of the Kiowa National Grasslands as I drove by. We turned back, hoping to find info on where we could visit a grasslands visitor center. As it turns out, this was it!
I spent a very pleasurable half-hour talking with Tom Mc___ about the grasslands. The grasslands they manage consist of parcels spread across 200 miles of high plains, stretching from the panhandle of Texas, across the panhandle of Oklahoma, and into northern New Mexico. The grasslands in many cases are lands which were turned back to the government during the Dust Bowl. They are managed for cattle grazing. The current price for grazing is $1.35 per AMU or animal-month-unit. In other words, the 'permittee' pays the government $1.35 per month for each animal grazing these federal lands. Tom says the rate is set by Congress and he obviously thinks it's too cheap.
Each rancher who wishes to lease grazing lands must come to the table with a ranch of at least 160 acres. And he/she must pay for any improvements to the grazing lands. Improvements must be approved by the government managers of the grasslands and in return the permittee is given credits toward his/her bill. The system tends to keep the same parcels assigned to the same ranchers year after year. If a rancher sells his/her 160-acre base parcel, the permit rights of any leased lands are generally recommended to the government to be assigned to the new owner.
When I mentioned that we had learned that the assumed acreage needed per cow in western New Mexico is 40 acres per cow, Tom said they use the same figure here. So it's not difficult to see that homesteaders who qualified for a 160-acre parcel had only enough land for four cows while back east, a 160-acre parcel would support 160 cows.
I noticed that some proscribed burning is done according to pictures posted on the board. Tom said that's generally done for noxious or invasive weed control though it does tend to be good for a parcel. He also said that a parcel must be 'rested' at least 60 days during the grazing season. This is done by dividing the parcels into pastures and moving the cattle from pasture to pasture to both avoid over-grazing the stubble to shorter-than-acceptable lengths and providing the rest period.
I asked Tom how a permittee might lose his permit rights and he said it would generally have to be something serious like permitting animals on the land outside of the proscribed grazing season or allowing cattle to eat the stubble too low.
The other interesting thing we learned from Tom was there had been a tornado a mile wide in Kansas last night!
We continued driving northeast and shortly crossed into Oklahoma. We weren't far from the Texas border either. This particular panhandle area of Oklahoma was once called 'No Man's Land' and is only about 35 miles wide. We drove through it in short order, noticing that already the grasses were getting greener and thicker.
We crossed into Kansas along the old Santa Fe Trail and had lunch at a McDonald's (our first Mickey-D stop for the trip) and then continued on to Dodge City. We talked for a half-hour or so with the visitor center women at Dodge City and learned that the two large beef-cattle operations east of town process some 10,000 head of cattle a day.
We turned more easterly now out of Dodge City and soon arrived in Greenburg, the site of the 2007 tornado which wiped out the city. There's still plenty of evidence of the tornado but we were surprised to not find a visitor's center. It appears the work is still concentrating on getting the city back to normal. The hospital opened recently and the new high school will open for the next school year.
Since we couldn't find a visitor's center we stopped at the Big Well Gift Shop. The Big Well had been one of Greenburg's claims to fame--- the world's largest and deepest hand-dug water well. We spoke with Helen Shrader, who had lived through the tornado crouched in the hallway of her home a few blocks away. She says her home is now in the landfill.
After Greenburg we continued East in the stronger-and-stronger winds. The winds were only supposed to be gusting to around 40 miles per hour but they were dead across our path. We could see oncoming tractor-trailers and larger Rvs leaning precariously into our lane. And when we passed a wind-break of some sort, Mocha Joe would suddenly dart to the right, then be thrown back left once past the wind-break.
We stopped in Witchita at the Wal-mart and Sam's Club to see if we could find a hidey-hole for the night but they were completely open to the wind so we moved on. Finally, at El Dorado State Park, east of the city, we found a campsite with some shielding by trees. Also, by that time (1900 or so), the winds were dying down a bit, making our site more comfortable.
We spent the evening blogging and reading and before dark I took a short walk along the El Dorado Reservoir.
-------------------------------
Thursday, 22 April-
In the night we had a bit of wind and some sleet and today was supposed to be quite a bit colder than yesterday.
We left Santa Fe this morning. We chose the High Road to Taos for our departure and that turned out to be a great choice. The route took us as up to 9000 feet as it rambled through the pine-covered mountains. As we drove we started noticing snow on the oncoming cars and soon we hit fresh snow in the mountain towns. The roads were clear but the light covering of snow was very pretty on the ponderosa pines in the bright sunlight.
In Taos we did a bit of shopping for supplies and took a turn through the visitor parking lot at Taos Pueblo. We had been there years before and today was colder and very muddy so we didn't stay.
We had been at Acoma Pueblo last Fall and had a tour and we know that Taos Pueblo doesn't normally do tours anyway so we didn't feel we'd miss anything but the many vendors and we had seen many vendors on the Plaza in Santa Fe.
We crossed the mountains to Angel Fire, an upscale skiiing and golfing resort. We enjoyed seeing the mountain valley and Eagle Nest Lake, then descending through Cimarron Canyon to the town of Cimarron. There we visited the Philmont Scout Ranch, a place I've wanted to see since I was a Boy Scout (in the Sixties!) We toured the museum and research library and then the Trading Post.
We then continued out Route 64 toward the extreme northeast corner of New Mexico. After passing through Raton we noticed the wind had shifted and it soon became very strong and on-the-nose. At one point we got out of the van at a rest area and had trouble closing the doors. As Labashi tried to re-enter the van, her longish hair blew straight up and nearly caught in the door as it slammed shut. That would have hurt!
As we drove on we could see the dark, low, rolling clouds of a fast-moving squall line to the north of us. We learned from our weather radio that the front was moving north-northwest and we were driving east and could see the end of the squall line. Sure enough some 35 miles later the wind had subsided quite a bit and we had clearer sky ahead. By the time we reached Clayton, it appeared we were past it.
At Clayton we turned back to the northwest toward Clayton Lake State Recreation Area for our campsite for the night. As the sunset came the sky cleared and we had a beautiful sun on the lake.
After supper we read and blogged and planned our route for the next few days.
Our drive today was also very interesting for its dramatic changes in scenery. We left the high desert of Santa Fe and crossed the New Mexico Rockies to Cimarron. Coming out of Cimarron Canyon, we had a sudden change from mountain pines to high plains. In fact, Cimarron's motto is “Where the Rockies Meet the Plains!”.
Northeast of Cimarron we saw massive ranches with a few beef cattle spread widely about. But on the drive from Raton to Clayton we crossed from The West to The East (OK, the MidWest). The sparse, dry, yellow, sprinkled-with-chollas vegetation of Cimarron changed to green, grassy, smaller ranches with herds of cattle. Very interesting changes for so short a distance.
************* END OF POST ***********
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home