Day 11 - 16 Oct - Leander TX to Carlsbad NM and everything in between

Yep!  The Mud Dragons tour continued today after several sweet days of R&R in the Austin, TX, area.  It was amazingly generous of my sister Amy and brother-in-law Randy to host the entire band (er, me) for nearly a week.

So, this morning, after catching an early Church meeting, we piled into the tour bus (er...I got in my car) and headed west. 

The last time I traveled east-west across Texas was back in the 1960s when my family lived in Metairie, Louisiana, (just outside of New Orleans - we lived there for 9 years) until I was in 5th grade.  Every summer but one, we drove from Louisiana to southern Utah to see grandparents and other relations.  Yes, Texas is HUGE!  This time I started in the Austin area, which is almost halfway across the state, and it still took me nearly 7 hours to get to New Mexico!  

The drive was super interesting, from an ecological point of view.  When I started, I was in the heart of the Texas hill country.  The low rolling hills around Austin are beautiful and tree-covered.  A few hours outside of Austin, the hill country started to level out and I noticed that I'd reached one (of many) of the oil field regions of the state.

And the landscape transitioned from trees everywhere to scattered scrub trees and flattened out considerably...it looked to me a lot like African savanna.  Well, without the giraffes, wildebeests, and lions, anyway.  But there were also oil wells scattered across the landscape - active wells have the pumpers like the one in the photo above on them.  And when they are pumping, the head goes up and down.  It makes total sense that this would be oil country, because it used to the the floor of a large arm of the ocean that extended all the way up into Wyoming.  And the plankton that lived and died and immediately got covered up by sediment, year after year, is the stuff that over time and under intense pressure, became petroleum.

This region is also a domain of long straight-shot driving.

If you click on the photo above and zoom in, you'll see that the highway simply keeps going straight as far as the eye can see.  

And, eventually, of course, I reached the edge of the world, er, Texas, and fell off, um, entered New Mexico - Land of Enchantment.  Sadly, I left my wizard's wand at home, so I'll have to keep on imitating all the muggles around here.

Once I got about halfway to the Texas-New Mexico border, the sky became completely overcast, with a smattering of sprinkles here and there, until it was legitimately raining on me when I pulled into Carlsbad, NM.  

If you're wondering what Carlsbad is like, well, here's a pic of the more or less upscale, inviting part of town (from my 4th floor motel room window).

Yep, tour is once again on the move.  We added another state to the list so far, and if all goes according to plan, I'll visit two national parks tomorrow.  Stay tuned for what will, I hope, be some AWESOME photos.

And sometime today, I officially passed the halfway point (in terms of driving miles) for this entire trip.  Here's the tour trail so far.

Thanks for checking in!  Cheers!!