My Paintings: We’re Here! We Made It!

Thursday 1 November 2007

We’re Here! We Made It!

After nearly 4 ½ hours of driving today we made it to Palo Duro Canyon arriving at about 1:45 p.m. It’s sunny and beautiful here with a light breeze and we’re backing on beautiful red rock cliffs. Here’s the view from our picture window. It's also the view from my lawnchair which is under the canopied area where the picnic table is located.

And here's our site:

The drive was uneventful and that's the kind of drive we like, we had no large cities to go through and although we had quite a climb as Amarillo is at a higher elevation most of the scenery was of flat land with scrubby type trees. We had a hazy sun for our drive here but here in the canyon the sun is bright. When we arrived the temperature at the rim was 63F (17C) but down in the canyon it was 68F (20C).

There was a large wind farm just west of the town of Weatherford, OK that I don’t think was there when we were through 2 years ago. I also noticed lots of OK State Park signs along I-40 so we just might have to come back to explore those. There was lots of red earth along the way and this is pretty much what the open road looked like on today’s trip. It also looks as if Texas is getting into the cotton growing crops.

We passed the town of Erich, OK which is the birthplace of Roger Miller. How many of you knew that? And how many cared?

We crossed into one of our favorite states, Texas at 11:23 a.m. and Gordon took my photo when we stopped at a picnic area for a break.

As we got closer to Amarillo the terrain changed to look more like this.

We're here!

And here's the first cactus we saw at the check in booth:

Here’s what the road looks like driving into the canyon. Gordon did an excellent job despite a pickup truck that was just ahead of us (not towing) that kept braking and slowing down and just generally being in our way.