Make a Hard Left

October 13, 2023 – Day 15

This was just a driving day, and a short one at that, only 221 miles. But 221 miles south, the wrong way to Phoenix but the right way to Midland for the eclipse. The only odd thing was that we hadn’t heard back from the Harvest Host. We figured it was just a museum parking lot and they even said no need to check in, just park. So we figured we’d do just that. You’re not supposed to show up without a confirmation, but hey, we’re just common scofflaws.

When you are traveling west in the western part of Texas it’s a relentless climb. But now we were going due south, and as it turned out we were descending. We were seeing an indicated 9+mpg on the trip computer. This was significantly better than our usual 6.5 to 7 mpg. Obviously we were loving that part of the trip.

Even though the descent or climb is unrelenting, Texas appears mostly flat.

Flat and empty, but at least we were in a happy place.

We saw cows. Cooler, we saw 2 bison. Initially we thought they were weird cows. Texas has a lot of different cow breeds, we’ve seen everything from Longhorns to dairy cows. But soon we realized that nope those were Bison, aka fluffy cows, we did not pet them. The co-pilot (cough*Paul*cough) couldn’t get the camera up in time so we have no photo proof. You’ll have to trust us. We have no idea of they were wild or ranch bison.

We were seeing more and more cotton. We knew from the trip earlier this year that cotton is a big crop in Texas. Not just big but it’s the leading crop in Texas. But that was during the winter/spring, so it wasn’t showing us those telltale white cotton tufts. It was pretty cool to see them.

We saw part of the Texas power grid, and wondered if it had been modified to withstand ice storms.

Travel days almost always involve getting gas. The Pilot/Flying J app doesn’t give you the address, it just uses Apple Maps to navigate. We try to get the address so it can go into our RV specific GPS (susan here: yes that’s a thing. A really, really important thing to know if you’re too tall, or long, or too heavy to navigate a section of road). Apple really let us down taking us into downtown Lubbock without a Pilot in sight. We did get to drive by Buddy Holly Ave. Holly was a Lubbock native.

Paul was navigating so he used Susan’s phone to find it on Google Maps. She had all three GPS squawking at her, but she made it. Apple was an entire exit off!

We gassed up and payed $10 to dump our sewage tanks. Once again Susan spent a good 10 minutes cleaning the front windshield (susan here: gee that thing is HUGE! At least the RV lanes have extra long squeegees so I can reach the top.) Back on the road we saw a giant dust cloud in the distance. Dust storm? No, it was farmers and tractors.

Next up, driving past a vineyard. Hang on a minute, vineyards in Texas? There sure are! Lots of them.

We’re now about an hour away from Midland we we still hadn’t heard back from our Harvest Host, The Petroleum Museum, and it’s working on 3pm. We needed to figure out alternate accomodations. Paul remembered that the Andrews, TX Chamber of Commerce had 5 free RV sites. You could not reserve them so we didn’t consider trying for them. But, Andrews is on the way to Midland and better, not as far south, we’d be driving less out of our way. This meant getting back to our planned path was going to be about 40 miles less each way. Even better? It was still as close to the midline of the eclipse as Midland, Texas.

So we pulled in. One camper was already there. We picked a spot and parked. They had 50A power, potable water, and a free dump station on the site. Oh well, we didn’t need that Pilot dump station after all. They take donations and we’ll be sure to make one. They were closed and we wanted to pay in person, we’ll call them soon.

So, we just settled down to wait for the eclipse. It was beastly hot, Paul didn’t want to go outside and setup the ham radio, so we just chilled the evening away. It was the perfect evening to write blogs. So, of course we didn’t and here we are days later catching up.

Daily: 219

Total: 2,244

Moving Miles/Day: 281

Overall Miles/Day: 150

mpg: 6.37 (We know. It’s not 9. There were some hard hours on this tank getting to Canyon.)