The last part of our Western, USA trip was spent with family. We entered Texas from New Mexico, and the land began to stretch out ahead of us. Stopped on the road, we saw what appeared to be a dog driving a truck! Only in Texas.
We passed 60 miles of non-stop windmills on our way into Amarillo, Texas, where we stayed overnight.
The following day, we traveled from the panhandle southwest to Wichita Falls, Texas. We noticed a lot of towns in Texas with the same names as famous towns in other places - it was like Texas was so big they had to borrow names from other states. But hey, welcome to Memphis - Texas that is! We saw more windmills and lots of solar panels. We were surprised that this state known for its oil is the site of so many alternative energy farms.
Wichita Falls was a pretty town a couple of hours north of Dallas, where our family lives. After breakfast in a nice coffee shop there, we headed to Dallas.
It was great to spend five days with our nephew Stephen, his wife, Shannon, and their two sociable boys, Christopher & Charlie. We went to the pumpkin patch, the botanical gardens, and the State Fair of Texas. We saw Christopher play baseball. But the highlight was just spending time with family, talking, playing with the kids, laughing, cooking, and eating. Paul just had to try the bacon fried with cotton candy, and we both had giant and delicious corndogs. A dinner at a BBQ restaurant was filling and somehow, very Texas.
We learned that both boys enjoy listening to popular musicians such as Taylor Swift & Miley Cyrus. I had to confess that while I've certainly heard a lot about Taylor Swift the past few years, I had no idea what her music sounded like. The boys played many songs for me. It was hard to leave them. Nevertheless, after five wonderful days, we headed north. We drove to Hot Springs, Arkansas, staying overnight on a big lake there.
The next day, we breakfasted at a wonderful French-Hungarian creperie. Then, we drove through the historic part of the town of Hot Springs before heading to Tennessee.
On the way to Tennessee, we passed cotton fields - something I realized I had never seen before. We saw more of them the following day on the way to Kentucky. We passed the mighty Mississippi River into Memphis (Tennessee, not Texas), realizing we had passed the tiny source in Minnesota a couple of months prior. We stayed overnight just past Memphis, then drove through Kentucky to Louisville to visit family.
After two restful days catching up with family in Louisville, we crossed the Ohio River into Cincinnati, then had lunch with a good friend in Dayton, Jane Katsuyama. As we headed north from Dayton to Toledo then on to Lansing, we noticed the fall trees becoming more colorful. Our arrival in Lansing marked the end of our long Western journey.
We saw many amazing sights during our two-month journey across the Western, USA. We drove 7,363 miles from Lansing to Lansing, traveling through the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and back into Michigan. 17 states! That's one-third of the USA. We both loved everything we saw, but we never want to take a car trip like that again! We're looking forward to more time in one place at a time. The hottest it got was 118F in the Nevada/Arizona desert and the coldest until we got back to Michigan was about 55F in the evening in Flagstaff.
I like to think that even though I am almost 67 years old, I can still learn to appreciate new things. Christopher & Charles, along with their Mom, Shannon, introduced me to the music of Taylor Swift. Although I hadn't much thought about her music one way or the other, it clearly has many people charmed. So I resolved that I would learn a Taylor Swift song to end this blog post. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be - in many ways more difficult than learning to sing in Portuguese, for example. The melody line is not instinctive for me. Buy hey, I can learn, right? I don't think Taylor has to worry about competition from me, but it was fun stretching into a new musical genre.
This song is dedicated to Christopher & Charlie. Thanks for sharing your music, guys.
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