Spring                                                          Hare Moon

One bit of local color I forgot.  Got gas in a very small town somewhere between Lubbock and Brownfield.  As I pumped the gas (hey, who remembers gas station attendants!), I noticed a metal box with a glass front door sitting in front of the convenience store.  Though it looked like a small refrigerator, smoke curled up and out of it from a vent on its side.  What the?

On closer inspection it had small panel that included this readout, meat probe temperature.  Yes, it was a small barbecue machine.  Sure enough inside they sold barbecue beef burritos, more meat, less burrito. (their sign)

Spring                                                     Hare Moon

Yes, Ancientrails is has turned over the season in Seminole, Texas.  The view out of my hotel window includes an Alon truckstop with several shiny container trucks and two tall pylon signs:  McDonalds and Phillips and a blood red sun over all of them.  I’m in America.

Please see Greatwheel either later today or tomorrow for the seasonal post about spring.

Right now I’m going to catch you up on news you might have missed if you hadn’t read the Seminole Sentinel.  This is a solid newspaper with good reporting unlike the El Dorado rag from yesterday.

On the front page is coverage of an educational session for the Farm Bill.  It gives the usual view from rural America.  We needed it.  It’s too late.  But, we’re glad to have it.  Next to it is some folks who run a guar processing plant trying to get compensation for lost crops last year.

Guar? You might say.  Me, too.  Turns out it’s a legume, valued for gum arabic and its nitrogen fixation.  This is a crop so old that wikipedia says it has never been found in the wild. It was first cultivated in India.  Reminds me that the world contains so much I don’t know.  It grows in semi-arid climates and on poor soil, so it’s not a crop for the midwest.

On the editorial page under the cleverly worded Wright Words, by Dustin Wright (groan), comes this interesting news.  On Valentine’s Day in Carlsbad, New Mexico the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reported trace amounts of americium and plutonium found above ground.  The plants monitoring and filtration system kept almost all of it from getting into the air above ground.  Wright goes on to add, “there’s still speculation about what happened below ground.”

Now, I have a good friend who is a nuclear engineer (you know who you are) and he’s convinced me that nuclear power might be a good transition method of electrical generation.  Still, these kind of events are worrisome.

Well, that’s all the news from Seminole, Texas.  At least all I’m going to convey.  Now it’s a shower, then on the road for Carlsbad Caverns.

Imbolc                                                Hare Moon

El Dorado, Kansas

First, thank you Garmin for the easy routing through Kansas City.  I know now why I’ve never succeeded too well on my own.  Whoever that woman is they have trapped in there, she knows her K.C. highways.

Driving through Minnesota, then Iowa and into Missouri is not a topographic paradise though I like seeing the growing wind farms in sight of 35 in Iowa.  The snow began to disappear south of Des Moines, but the countryside all through those states had that glum grimy appearance that makes you want to grab a good shampoo and go after it until it brightens up.  The sky, too, was gray.

The garmin guided me around K.C., no sights there either.  My initial goal was to get beyond the Kansas border, but I accomplished that by about 5:00 pm or so and decided to go on a bit.  Then I hit the Flint Hills.  If you’ve not driven through them, they would surprise you.  They are long, long stretches of uninhabited grassland largely given over to cattle grazing and oil wells.

That meant when I stopped in Emporia and found the Food Show was in town sucking up all the available hotel beds, I had to travel another 50 miles to get here, El Dorado.  The first place I tried here was full, too.  The refinery turnaround the desk clerk said. Oh.

Anyhow the Best Western further in had a room and so I’m down for the night.

Tomorrow I’ll travel through my birth state, Oklahoma.  There are lots of family memories there, but few of mine.

It’s good to be on the road.

Imbolc                                                                  Hare Moon

A Minnesota send off in the air this morning.  Looks like the  storm track is northerly, so I should drive out of it soon.

Ancientrails will be coming to you from the road for the next couple of weeks.  Tonight somewhere in the area of Kansas City, hopefully beyond it though that might be pressing.

Friend Tom Crane bought me a large print road atlas for the journey.  Ha!  It’s a good addition to the garmin.  I’ll use it often on the way.  Thanks, Tom.

Imbolc                                                                            Hare Moon

Back in the early 90’s I spent a week plus in a residential library in Hawarden, Wales.  I took a side trip or two, one to Holywell where I visited the Holy Well of St. Winifred, site of the ancient healing of a Celtic woman named Winifred by her uncle Bueno.  Her head had been cut off by a suitor from Hawarden named Caradoc.

While I was there I met a short, thick Welshman.  When he discovered (immediately) that I was an American, he asked me, “Da ya know any stars?”  At first I didn’t get it, then I realized he was talking about Hollywood stars.  “No,” I explained, “I’m about 1,500 miles from Los Angeles.”  “Yes, yes,” he said, “But do ya know any stars?”

The old world experience of distance is different from ours and it’s easy to forget that.  This trip to Tucson will pass from gardening zone 4 to gardening zone 9.  It will go south of the line, the 37th latitude boundary, above which we get no vitamin D in the winter months.  It will pass even further, down below latitude 35, a full 10 degrees from the home world here in Minnesota, to 32 degrees latitude.  I’ll drive, too, from 93 degrees longitude to Tucson’s 111.

In Europe, driving south from Holywell, Wales you would have to go on past Naples by another 150 miles to achieve the same distance.  That means going through England, across the Chunnel, then across France, all of Switzerland and penetrating almost to the boot of Italy.  That sounds like an epic journey, crossing cultures and history as well as distance.

Yet I will drive the same distance to get to Tucson, 1650 miles.  No wonder the Welshman wondered if I knew any stars.

Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Road trip.  I love traveling with Kate and we’ve had many good trips already and will have many more.  I also love traveling alone.  Or, you might say, I just love to travel.  Less so now maybe than in years past, but not by much and now that’s only so because of the strong pull home has for me.  It takes some time to get past the inertia created by a place that fits my life so well.

Once I get on the road though, I’m there.  I love the randomness of travel, the mistakes and the happy accidents.  This is, I’m pretty sure, a direct reflection of my father’s love of just getting in the car and going somewhere.  He had a traveling gene, maybe one from that blacksheep Grandpa Elmo who finally lit out for the territories. It’s no surprise that Mary’s in Singapore and Mark’s in Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the destination.  I plan to descend into Carlsbad Caverns, have a wonderful workshop in Tucson, get in some hiking in the Catalina Mountains and see as much of Chaco Canyon as I can.  After being reminded of its existence by Mark Odegard, I may also take a side trip to Manitou Springs, Colorado, a vestigial remnant of sixties culture stuck in the Rockies west of Colorado Springs.

But along the way I’ll have a lot of time by myself on the road. I’ll see new towns and new topography.  Some things will appear that haven’t occurred to me, but that seem good at the moment.  And, of course, there’s road food.  Especially the tex-mex and other Mexican flavored cuisines of the southwest.  Not long now.