Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Oklahoma City to Tucumcari, New Mexico

Tonight we are resting comfortably and quite happily in a little place called Tucumcari, New Mexico. I love that I've never heard of this place in my whole life ~ and here we are! We left Oklahoma City early this morning. My pictures of the city aren't worth posting. We traveled along for a little bit and then got off to see the thriving city of El Reno, OK. Afterall, they have the ONLY trolley in all of Oklahoma that runs on rails! Couldn't possibly pass that up!
We drove around looking for the depot. Mr. Jones has built-in radar for this kind of thing and before long, we were there!
There was a nice museum inside the depot. We looked around for a bit and then went to purchase our trolley tickets ...
We then took a very rickety, jiggly ride in the trolley around this tiny two-bit town (!). The driver was a sweet old guy who was extremely proud of his part in maintaining the historic significance of El Reno.
This is just a typical ranch ... we saw 100's of these throughout our travels today. Notice the beautiful SUNNY sky! Thank-you LORD! :)
As we were driving along the highway, we saw this military transport plane in the distance, getting closer and closer and ... it looked like it was going to land on the highway ...
At one point, it was flying directly over the van ~ SO LOW ~ like it was going to land right on top of us! It was kind of fun, actually, but a little scary too!
Look how close it is! Yikes!
We went through Amillaro, but it's quite a sprawling place and none of my pictures are worth showing you (again). We were soon in New Mexico and these are the kinds of landscapes we saw.
We finally arrived in Tucumcari, which is the name of this plateau. Tucumcari Mountain was once used by the Comanches as a lookout post.
We were hungry, so the fellow at the hotel gave us directions to the Pow Wow, a nice restaurant a few blocks away, where we enjoyed a hearty meal!
Today was a much better day. The SUN was warm and beautiful and the temperature was in the 60's most of the day ~ a welcome relief from all of that rain!
So tomorrow will bring us to El Paso! We figure we have about a 7-hour trek from here; so that will get us to the base by about mid-afternoon ... hopefully in time to meet Emma's bus!

1 comment:

Sabrina said...

That plane is low! Yikes! I wonder why it was so low? I'm so glad that you are out of the huge rain and into the bright sunshine. I hope and pray that you will make it to the base in time to see Emma come off the bus- she will love that as much as you will. Stay safe driving!