Texas

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Day two of this trip started at night in Texas. With five states behind me, Texas was a big landmark in my path. I had never seen Texas before and I was very anxious to get there and experience what its landscape had to offer. As we entered the state, I realized we didn’t plan our entrance accordingly. It was pitch black in the night and all the way to Dallas was pretty much a dark void… a little disappointing for someone who had been waiting all day to see the scenery.

From Dallas I merged onto I-35 N to head up to Oklahoma and link onto the famous route 66. While driving north on this road in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of miles of open farm land and darkness, I drove into what I wrote as being a huge, glowing orange dome above us. The sky was unlike anything I had ever seen and was truly breathtaking from the driver seat of the car I was driving. In the middle of the night, I was driving under a huge fluorescent orange dome, with no cities anywhere near me to be giving off any light. Those are the moments that defined this trip. Experiencing and seeing first-hand the natural wonders of our country. Sitting back, finding the rhythm of the road and grooving to it. I couldn’t believe how much the land had changed in such a short time. I couldn’t believe I was still in my own country, and I was only half way across. The land began to tell its own story.

As morning neared and this dusty orange glow faded into the daylight and my sense of place in the world was immediately given a reality check. It’s the thing about standing in the middle of a four-way intersection of dirt roads that extend, completely flat and worn, for miles on end into the horizon. Or just being able to follow a road for as long as your eyes will allow you to see. Everything was so big and open. Texas made me feel small.

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