New Mexico

We spent the night outside of Oklahoma City at yet another WalMart.  I had seen severe storms, including tornadoes, predicted for the area before we ever left home, so I was a little concerned.  However, the weather was fine when we pulled in.  We all settled in for the best night of sleep I’ve had since we started.  Thankfully, the storms waited until about 4:00 or so to start.  Thank God, it was just more thunderstorms, but boy were they loud and strong.  The power to WalMart was knocked out, which was indeed a blessing since it took out the power to the parking lot lights and we were able to sleep in darkness.  We made it through the storms without any issues and said our morning prayers thanking God for our safety.

Charlie took the kids into WalMart just before we left to pick up a couple food items.  They came back with a beautiful card and white roses for me for Mother’s Day.  I spent the day sniffing those roses.  They smelled so pretty.  It was so wonderful to smell something truly beautiful when I had stinky feet sitting just behind me.  It is time for showers for this crew!

Windmills in Texas

As we drive through Texas and Oklahoma we see much flat land.  This is what I always envision when people speak of the flat areas of Kansas.  There are wind farms everywhere.  The sky is so blue.  Every once in a while you see a house in the middle of a field.  Everything appears so flat as you can see the horizon miles away from you, but we keep noticing that we are going up in elevation.  Driving in the panhandle of Texas we are at over 4000 feet elevation.  So many of the small communities around here appear to be dead.  We see many abandoned houses and businesses.  It is sad thinking about how much these homes and businesses meant to the people that built them.  The few trees that we do see here aren’t much in the way of trees, especially when you think of the trees that we know in South Carolina, the live oaks, magnolias, maples, etc.  Although this area of the country has a beauty of its own, it definitely causes me to be thankful for the trees that I love so much in my neck of the woods.

Because we weren’t seeing many trees, Nathanael keeps asking, “When will we be in the desert?”  I told him so many times that I wasn’t sure.  The last time he asked, I told him that we would be in the desert when we began seeing cacti.  When we entered New Mexico, we stopped at the rest area.  We walked around for a while, and I went and asked one of the ladies that was working there when we would reach the desert.  She told me that we were actually already in the desert.  It is called the high desert because it is located in a high altitude.  They still get little enough rain to be classified as a desert.

High desert of New Mexico

We didn’t get nearly as far as I had hoped we would while on the road today.  Ryon needed to spend some time writing a paper for his history class, so we spent a couple hours roaming around a welcome center while Ryon used their WiFi.  Charlie made us a delicious lunch of chicken quesadillas.

Charlie and I both keep commenting on how totally amazed we are at such different landscapes than we are accustomed to in the Southeast.  What a beautiful country we live in.  We are so truly blessed!

Blessings to you all,

Rebecca