Day 21 – 5607 miles … Through New Mexico into the Great State of Texas

We opted for an early start, as we needed to make miles. We bid adieu to our campground and headed southeast towards Dallas and home. We new that this was going to be a long driving day without a “real” destination, so Michelle researched our route the night before and we picked some things to do along the way.

Our first stop was for breakfast, we saw a marker that read “Fort Sumner” and followed it … it lead us to the “real” grave of Billy the Kid, I assume many others are claiming to have his grave as well … anyways … we stopped by to get a couple of picture. Only Jack and Jaci were awake, so we strolled the little cemetery, spent a few minutes and continued on our way. We stopped at a little park about 5 minutes further to have breakfast and convert the beds for travel … didn’t feel right having breakfast at a grave site.

We continued on our way to Clovis, NM … nothing much of a town, except that it is near to Cannon AFB, which I think is a Special Ops Wing. From what we read, Clovis had a city zoo … and it did. We stopped at the park, and spent a very pleasant hour and a half walking around and looking at their animals. The Clovis zoo is no San Diego, ok, it’s no Sanford, FL … but it was very casual, had some interesting animals and lots, and I mean lots of peacocks … you could keep any of the feathers you collected, so we gather a few as souvenirs. We made lunch in the RV and continued on our drive.

What we have figured out, is that as long as we have some sort of stop, doesn’t matter what … every 3-4 hrs, the kids don’t go crazy and neither do we … not sure why the timeframe, maybe it has to do with a span of time that they deem too long … we’ll be there in 3 hrs is so much more acceptable to them than, we’ll be there in 8 hrs … weird … but important to know. This isn’t the fastest way to travel, but it is definitely the most enjoyable.

We crossed into Texas and were immediately greeted by the Texas flag, proudly flying everywhere … the “Lone Star”, was on the side of every building and emblazoned on the back window of most trucks … the road signs changed from “Please don’t litter” … to, “Don’t mess with Texas” … our first port of call in Texas was the town of Lubbock. This was a “play” stop at a local park … which had a great and very large play area … temperature was around 100F in the sun, but it was a dry heat :).

The kids dehydrated out in about 45 minutes and wanted back in the RV. We headed to the nearby Target for some quick provisioning and off we set again. Our drive, as with most we have had, was very picturesque … what struck me the most was the number of windmills and wind farms that we passed. I easily drove a 150 mile stretch on Highway 84 from Lubbock to Sweetwater that had a continuous (no kidding here) string of wind mills. There are thousands of these out here … very weird to see at first, then very nice … as they are in constant movement.

Most of the windmills sat on the same land as oil jacks … and most had soy cultivated there … triple win … oil, wind energy and biodiesel … impressive and forward thinking.

Our plan was to make it past Dallas on our way to Shreveport, we would stop near Abilene for dinner, play a little and continue on. On a lark, we checked to see if they had a movie that we could see … wouldn’t you know it, a drive-in, just off the interstate … opened at 730P, first movie at 915P, a kids one … G-Force. I’ve never been to a drive-in, the kids hadn’t and Kelly had  only seen them in movies.

We made our stop and pulled in around 8P. It was buy 1 burger and get 1 free at the snack bar, so dinner was all set. The owner came by to say hello and ask where we were from. Nice guy, told us that at 9P they do a raffle drawing and have the kids pick tickets … would our girls want to do it? He has a camera and they would be projected onto the big screen …

We settled into our patio chairs outside the RV, waiting for our movie, while Kate and Jaci headed to the ticket drawing :) For about 10 minutes before the drawing, both Kate and Jaci danced in front of the camera, projected on 2 drive-in movie theatre screens … they had a great time … when they did the drawing, they introduced themselves, said they where from Florida and got a bunch of horns from the crowd … we even won a box of candy :)

We all watched the movie, Jack on me, Jaci on Michelle, Genna on Kelly and Kate on her own … Genna “loved” it, Jack slept through it, Kate “really liked it”, Jaci “liked the movie, but would have preferred Air Conditioning” :) … We left after the first movie, got on the road and pushed to about 80 miles west of Dallas and stopped for the night.