On the Road

 

It has been a long time since I took a road trip in the U.S. just for fun. Yes, I’ve done several over the past few years, but their primary purpose was to research a book. But this year Roland and I decided to take a road trip to Arizona to see his sister and her husband, no research involved.

We have a map of the world in our hallway showing all the places we have been. We frequently add pins for the new places we visit, but lately they’ve all been international. (The photo at the head of this post was taken in January 2019 and does not show any of the places we have traveled since.) Roland wanted to add pins for Oklahoma and New Mexico, which he has driven through but never stopped and visited. So after a short visit with Roland’s brother in Lebanon, Missouri, we were off to Oklahoma, where we visited two museum complexes.

The Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve was created by Frank Philips, who founded Philips 66. During his lifetime, he brought in a number of exotic animals that still live there today (or their children and grandchildren do). I wasn’t happy with most of the animal photos I took, but here are a llama and an ostrich. The next two photos show the museum building and the Mountain Man Camp, which is a living history exhibit showing how trappers lived when they came to sell their furs.

The Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, Oklahoma was also interesting. My favorite part inside the museum was a multi-media presentation about “Terrible Tuesday” in 1979, when twelve tornados struck an area in Oklahoma and Texas in 2 hours. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of exhibit I could take photos of. I did take photos of the show outside the museum, where the prairie dogs watched us watching them. It was hard to get good photos in the bright sun, but here are two of the best.

From Oklahoma, we drove through Texas to New Mexico. I took the next photo in Texas. By then I was riding with my camera in my lap, and this was a common scene in the oil country of Oklahoma and Texas and even some of the time in Arizona.

Our first sightseeing stop in New Mexico was at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The ranger-guided tour was sold out, but the self-guided tour was fantastic by itself. The timing wouldn’t have worked out anyway because it took us almost twice as long to get through the self-guided tour as they said it would. That’s because they don’t base it on people like me who keep stopping to take photos. Here are just a few. I named the Flying Eagle, Frankenstein, and Jabba the Hutt based on what I saw in them, but the Lion’s Tail had already been given that name. The other two are just pretty.

New Mexico was also where we saw the White Sands National Park. The sand is white because it is gypsum from an ancient sea. We climbed one of the dunes to see what was on the other side (more of the same), but we didn’t take any of the longer trails because it was 98° out. There are several plants that seem to thrive in the dry, sandy soil, though. The cactus is a Soup Yucca and I don’t know what the yellow flowers are. The other two photos show the terrain.

The scenery along the way was gorgeous. I took lots of photos but mourn the ones that I missed because I was driving.

Driving along I-10 in New Mexico with its 75 mph speed limit, we kept seeing signs warning of possible dust storms with zero visibility. These were followed by signs giving instructions in this order:

• 1.     Pull off to the side;
• 2.     Shut the engine off;
• 3.     Take your foot off the break (presumably so that if somebody hits you from behind your car will move forward rather than crushing in on you); and
• 4.     Stay buckled up.

Fortunately, we encountered only one dust storm. It occurred when Kathryn was driving through Oklahoma or Texas and lasted for just a few feet.

We ended up at Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where we had a good visit with Sue and Bob. The highlight there is the London Bridge, which the founder bought in London, had dismantled, and reassembled in Lake Havasu.

After leaving Lake Havasu, we stopped at Wupatki National Park. Wupatki is a Native American pueblo inhabited over a thousand years ago. While we were walking around the ruins, we saw thunder in the distance. We made it to our car before there was any rain but got confused when we left (the GPS kept trying to send us down dirt or even nonexistent roads) and ended up leaving the park the way we entered it although it was probably the longer way around. It also meant that we missed seeing an old volcano. We did see a smaller pueblo with a nice view into a canyon. The final two photos show the main building at Wupatki and the canyon as seen from the smaller pueblo.

Wupatki was the last sightseeing stop on our trip. The temperature was in the upper 90s and even reached 101 for most of the trip, but it dropped into the 50s at Wupatki. There were some serious thunderstorms, and we drove through rain so heavy that at one point we pulled off at a truck stop for over half an hour as we waited for the rain to let up enough to restore a minimum of visibility. We also drove through what looked like snow on the side of the road but was actually hail. Fortunately, it had stopped by the time we got there.

We enjoyed our trip, but it’s always nice to come home again.