I am going to post about my current trip, simultaneously with the remaining segments on my spiritual journey of last month.  The purpose of this long jaunt is more about specifically connecting with people- my family and my cyberfamily.  There were critical elements of that social connection in the last trip, also, but my struggle with myself took center stage.  There will be spiritual aspects on the current trip as well, especially when I stop for some hikes, on my way back west.

I had intended, on Saturday, August 24, to attend a picnic for my American Legion Post, until about 1 PM.  Rain intervened, and while I didn’t get out of town until 1, anyway, I drove as far as Santa Rosa, NM, before calling a halt to Day 1.  Here, I found a good motel, American Inn.

Santa Rosa and its sister city, Tucumcari, are good places to rest, going back and forth from Arizona to anywhere along the mid-southern corridor.

There was someone waiting for me in Amarillo, though, so I did not avail myself of Santa Rosa’s blue lakes or Tucumcari’s dinosaur museum. I kept on, to the Blue Front Cafe, and an hour or two of banter with my old friend, Texas Tidbits, aka Wes H.

Once 2 PM rolled around, the cafe closed, Wes and I gabbed for about twenty more minutes outside, and I was on my way again.  After hearing from my Oklahoma City friends that everyone was either busy or sick, I rolled through the north Texas plains, which are rougher than you might think.  This is, after all Tejas, and nothing is all that easy, except the bantering.

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I stopped briefly at a Texas Travel Center, west of the hamlet of Alanreed, took the above two photos, and had a White Knight moment, helping a woman unlatch the hood of her Ford.  It took me about ten minutes of investigation before locating the latch release, but, one and done.  I was to cross the entire state of Oklahoma in one fell swoop, before landing for the night, at a Knight’s Inn, as luck would have it, in Fort Smith, AR.  One does, however, have to oblige the Sooner State with at least one photograph, however, so here is the Oklahoma Visitor Center, in Midwest City, where I stopped and said prayers for my sick Oklahoma friends, and for the people in Moore, who are still rebuilding.

Next:  Fort Smith National Historic Site