More Recuperation - At Home

I'm back from San Angelo.  It turns out my trip timing was excellent.  I left the Albuquerque area on Wednesday and had lovely, albeit windy weather for the drive to San Angelo.  In reading the local newspaper after I got back, it turns out the Albuquerque area had just enough moisture plus freezin temperatures to turn a major highway interchange into a skating rink.  About 20 cars ended up wrecking, including several police cruisers who were responding to the accidents.  Nobody was badly hurt so that was a good thing.

I came back on Saturday and had lovely weather for long distance driving.  On Sunday, a cold front moved through with resulting high winds.  Today, portions of the state got snow - including areas that I drove through on Saturday.  Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, driving through eastern New Mexico and western Texas can be mind numbingly boring at times.  For example, large parts of west Texas (north and west of Big Spring) are devoted to cotton... as seen here.

The brown parts of the photos are fields of harvested cotton.  For fans of the movie Places in the Heart, cotton is no longer harvested using crews of field hands.  Instead farmers have large (and hugely expensive) machines that have one person sitting up in a cab and driving down the rows.  Much more efficient.  As you can see, the fields go on for MILES.  In the right-hand photo, the small area on the extreme right hand side of the picture are mature trees surrounding a farm house. 

After the cotton is harvested, it is pressed into large rectangular shape generally the size of a large travel trailer.  These are later loaded onto trucks and moved to communal cotton gins located around the area.  Usually the gins are just called things like Co-op Gin of (insert nearest community).  One of the better named gins is the one located at Punkin Center.  Note:  to my knowledge there are no pumpkins/punkins at Punkin Center.  Just lots more cotton - the field just behind the sign looks like it's waiting to be harvested.  That's not snow on the ground, just open cotton bolls.

In addition to cotton and cattle, there are numerous places in both west Texas and eastern New Mexico where there's lots of drilling for natural gas.  So you see lots of these devices, they're called pumpjacks (I think).  All day long they go up and they go down.  Rather hypnotic in their own way.

Also, as mentioned before, there are some weird place names in west Texas.  On the south side of Sterling City is Bodcaw Draw.  (Reminder to self, must remember to do some research on what the heck is a bodcaw?)

Trips can be fun.  But it's also good to be home, especially knowing that the Sandia Mountains east of town got snow today.  Hooray for not having to drive through it!

Papillon