| 30th
April, 2009: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma Report: Clyve Herbert
Today we left Flagstaff at 6.20am with frost on the
ground and ice on the roads. We decided first up to head for Meteor Crater, 55kms SE of
Flagstaff, touted as one of the best preserved meteor impact craters in the world. We
arrived around 7am to find the entire crater fenced off, gates closed and not opening till
8am. We decided not to hang around......
We continued on passing from Arizona to New
Mexico...by mid morning, the sun had burned off the frost and revealed an arid country
with patchy scrub and occasional gnarled trees. No matter what time of the day, the
behemoth trucks continue to ply the I-40, sometimes in groups of 5 to 10. One can imagine
the hundreds and thousands of trucks extending along the I-40 at any one time.
Occasionally, near a railway, an almost 2km train would pass, double stacked with
containers, 5 or 6 locos at the head. Not only is America big, but so are its feeding
tentacles.
New Mexico appears to follow its namesake - Mexico.
It comes across as a rundown, poor state, however everybody seemed to own a Ford
F150 or a giant Silverado - they appear to be the mainstay of the driving public in
America's mid west. Despite the aridity, the New Mexico sub desert region beckons your eye
to unusual geological formations with coloured strata from grey to red, and dry river
beds. You forget you are on a plateau almost 6,000' high.
By late morning, we are pushing deeper into New
Mexico and need fuel.....we discover every fuel station in America, no matter where,
requires you to swipe a debit or credit card at the pump, the LCD readout instructs you
how to do it, however, this often doesn't work the way it should.....and occasionally
spend up to 5 minutes trying to get the damn things to work.This is usually followed by a
terse message over the PA near the pump....from a real human telling you step by step on
how to make the thing work. We also discovered that Americans are difficult to anger, and
remain composed and cordial, no matter how much you wave your arms about trying to get the
infernal pumps to operate. We were also in need of a caffeine fix...and we discovered that
cappuccino is not an art of coffee making in America. We pull over to a McDonalds in
Gallup and order 2 cappuccinos....the attendant asked if we wanted any particular type of
flavour..."aah, just coffee flavour thanks mate". This seemed to puzzle
the attendant, apparently in America you can get cappuccino in a number of flavours, from
beef jerky <g> to Irish Cream....we ended up with a foul grey looking muck which
resembled the taste of sour goat's milk and made me sick..the concoction was thrown into
the next bin. From here on in, it was black coffee....percolated!
Back on the road, we approached Albuquerque, with a
backdrop of fantastic rocky looking mountains reaching over 8,000'. Despite temperatures
near 30C, the northern part of this range is still snow capped setting a strange contrast
between the grey dry desert and the snow capped mountain tops. The I-40 zips through
Albuquerque and pretty soon we are into the east of New Mexico and approaching the west
Texas border. The remarkable change comes pretty soon into west Texas - the ramshackle
homes of the New Mexico desert are gone...it is obvious that Texas shows its prosperity,
or pride - not sure which takes No 1 place. We discover on the sides of the roads in
almost every town, fireworks supermarkets, often placed next to Baptist churches. The
countryside changes dramatically by the central Texas panhandle, with green fields dotted
with freshly budding oak trees. It's interesting to note the peculiarities of
roadkill...armadillos, deer, strange looking dogs, tortoises and coyotes, and the ever
present buzzards circling and growing fat.
We stop at a Route 66 garage and buy a southern
chicken wrap...$1.49each - food and bottles of coke are cheap, unlike in Australia where
we are ripped off with ridiculously inflated prices. Surprisingly the $1.49 chicken wrap
was brilliant!! and 40,000 truckers can't be wrong!
We push our Dodge Charger back onto the highway
pointing east, forgetting that we are actually here to chase weather, and later in the day
across the green fields of the Texas panhandle we see our first developing storm in
western Oklahoma. We pull off the road at Shamrock to photograph a developing supercell,
and were immediately accosted by a local farmer wanting to know what we were doing. We
told him we'd come from Australia to chase storms.....the cocky looked positively stunned
but it broke the ice. We had arrived in Tornado Alley. |
