Days 65 to 69: Amarillo & Fritch, TX

On our way to the Texas Panhandle from Santa Fe, we found ourselves suddenly off the scrubby desert hinterlands—surrounded by the endless, golden plains. It was one of the bottlenecks for charging on our route, so we drove slow to save power, and marveled at the sky (until it got dark and we white-knuckled it through the Texas countryside).

Well into our third month on the road, we’ve reached a sort of traveling cadence that transcends each new place—the vast plains, the cute restaurants, the southern/midwestern culture blend, the Trump flags and mega crosses; all have felt like one 3-week blur of plodding east. We started our Texan adventure in Amarillo—home of Cadillac Ranch, the Second Amendment Cowboy, and some cool midcentury architecture.

Our brief time in Northern Texas was highlighted by several days of free camping beside Lake Meredith, with near-supreme privacy even during the holiday weekend. We saw an actual roadrunner, ate great Tex-Mex in nearby Borger, watched lovely sunsets (and breathtaking pink beams in the sky), and when the morning came to move onward, the wind made sure we were well awake at the dark hour of 3am.

Unable to fall back asleep, we braved the gusts that had been bearing our tent down upon us, managed to pack everything up, and headed through the record-breaking-lows gifted by the now-infamous Arctic Blast. Icy snow made an abrupt appearance as Hampton made sure we weren’t blown any further south by the epic streams of deadly winter-in-autumn-in-Texas.

See all that green? That’s where we froze our butts off.

We marveled at the timing—the exact days we’re there, specifically to avoid the cold of more northern states, of COURSE a blast of Arctic air comes wailing down to freeze the land!—and we crossed into Oklahoma for our next stay, thankfully not in the tent.

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1 Comment

  1. love the next to the last photo of the sunset over the lake.
    love the photo of the grasshopper
    cant believe you saw a real roadrunner
    dont like wasps or wasp pic’s
    looks just like i would expect Texas to look. captured well

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