Day 4- Elk City, Oklahoma to Albuquerque, New Mexico

We left the hotel at 8:00 A.M. on the dot. Oklahoma rolled by into Texas with slow incremental changes. At first, the landscape became flatter and flatter, had less and less vegetation with slow rolling hills, and arroyos carved into them. Next we came to a Texas Welcome Center near Lake McClellan, Texas, a 50-mile long reservoir that was not apparent from our vantage point on Interstate 40, though a small canyon and wild flowers afforded a rather spectacular view behind the center. I’ve included two photographs here.

On the other side of Amarillo the landscape continued to become more and more arid, and a shallow break in the ground running from the northeast to the southwest across the entire landscape, horizon-to-horizon seemed to demark the final transition to desert. Eastern New Mexico seemed to be one world-filling cauldron containing nothing but broken rocks tumbling from rocky buttes and hillsides into silver-grass filled valleys.

After driving over and around Sandia Peak, we arrived in Albuquerque around 2:00 P.M. Mountain Time having gained another hour just inside the New Mexico state border. We drove immediately to Old Town, parked the car and rambled through the Plaza where we visited craft shops and galleries, San Felipe Neri Church, and located the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in order to visit that on our return trip later next week. We also found a pleasant sidewalk café/bar and had salsa and chips, and a relaxing libation. We drove to our hotel on the north side of the city about 5:30 P.M. and discovered that our 4th story room has a wonderful view of the mountains east of the city. We shopped for take out and then ate in our room in order to watch the pink and orange light of the setting sun crawl up craggy Sandia Peak.

Day Three – Elk City, Oklahoma

*

Surprise, surprise! After traveling 500 miles and having driven through Oklahoma City, we discovered a large Wind Turbine Farm outside of Weatherford, Oklahoma. The site crowns the rolling prairie country, and has about 45 turbines scattered over a 25 square mile site. The three blades on each turn slowly and majestically slightly out of synchronization with one another against a creamy blue sky. I really can’t do justice to the beauty of the site.

I looked it up on line and found that it is the most recent farm created in the United States. Each turbine creates 1.5 megawatts.

Practical as ever, Joe said we couldn’t stop on Interstate 40 today because of traffic, so I’m going back on the return trip, drive into the countryside, stay till sunset and shoot a few hundred photographs.

Tonight we are staying in a Comfort Inn and Suites in Elk City, and will drive the approximately 450 miles to Albuquerque tomorrow.

love to everyone.

*Wendell, Roger J., "Wind Energy" at http://www.rogerwendell.com/wind.html. viewed at 7:55 PM EDT.

Forest City, Arkansas

Short entry this time because I’m running behind this morning. Yesterday we drove through the remnants of Humberto’s downpours, and the entire state and 3 major cities of Tennessee, Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis. Last night we stayed at a Hampton in 30 miles inside the Arkansas line, ate a very good dinner next door at Don Jose’s Restaurant – owned and run by a Mexican family, and filled with local clientele. Today we plan to drive through all of Arkansas, and most of Oklahoma, where the “corn grows as high as an elephant’s eye, and the waving wheat can sure smell sweet…”

Love to everyone, even George (He needs it most.)

John

First Day - Rehoboth Beach to Bristol Tennessee

We left the house at 8:15 A. M., only 15 minutes late, and did one tenth less than the last mile of 500 miles by 5:00 P.M. Terrible traffic around Washington D. C. was to be expected, but once we were on Interstate 66 and out of the metropolitan area we made great time.

The Shenandoah Valley in Virginia was a surprise. It is absolutely beautiful with hazy pale gray-layered mountains, rolling grass hills, and farms. It warrants a separate trip through the Blue Ridge some future fall, I think.

The photographs I’ve posted tonight are of Joe and I after loading the car this morning and at the Hampton Inn in Bristol this evening. We explored downtown Bristol after relaxing by the pool with a glass of wine, and found a great restaurant, the State Line Bar and Grill in a town full of antique stores and a surprise Blue Grass and Rock Festival. For a town of about fifteen to twenty thousand in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the place hums. For dinner we had a “build your own appetizer in which we chose stuffed mushrooms, fried onions, and potato skins. I had a delicious, rare sirloin steak with roasted asparagus for the main course, and Joe had a huge ground sirloin hamburger with Swiss cheese, tomato and lettuce, fried okra, and of course dill pickles.

Now, we are ready to relax, watch a bit of the boob tube, and catch some “z-z-z-z-z-s.”

Tomorrow we drive from Bristol, Tennessee to Brinkley Arkansas, another 500 miles.


The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

St. Augustine

Trip West

I will be posting photographs and a basic diary about our trip west to my art journal so friends can follow us. I hope everyone will share and enjoy our trip with us.

The New Emerging Delaware Artist

I’ve won the Faucett Okie Award for a new emerging Delaware artist at the 69th Annual Rehoboth Art League Fine Art Show. I’m pleased as punch, because I never expected it. And, I almost didn’t enter the Annual because the work I intended to enter, “Henlopen Fishermen” was not accepted when I brought it to the Art league because it was too large. So, I ran home and put together the parts from two different broken Neilson frames in order to frame another drawing that I had just finished. The work is titled “Atlantic Evening.” Both drawings are 32” by 40,” but “Henlopen Fishermen” Is in a two Inch wide wooden frame, which makes it larger than the acceptable dimensions as stated in the Annual’s prospectus. “Atlantic Evening” won the award.

I joke with Joe that actually I am reemerging for another 15 minutes. Now, all I have to do is prove it by finding a Rehoboth Beach gallery that is interested in showing my work. So far that isn’t happening. Part of the problem is that each gallery has an image of itself it wishes to portray. The only gallery whose image fits well with my work has a full stable of artists.* At least, I think that is the problem because I visit with the owners on a regular basis hoping that they will suggest I join their “list of participating artists.” They have not done so. Ah well - I will continue talking to gallery people in and around Lewes and Rehoboth Beach on a regular basis with the goal of eventually so captivating one gallery owner that he/she will feel it is absolutely necessary to put me on their list of showing artists, and give me a show.

*Actually, I hate the term “stable” when it is used to describe a gallery’s list of showing artists because it makes us sound like so much anti-biotic and steroid infused meat ready for the slaughter house.

Global Warming and the Wind

Perhaps it’s a bit precipitous to attribute the constant strong Easterly wind here in South Florida to global warming. Never the less, I’m doing so because last winter and spring there were many days when the Atlantic was calm as a lake. We went swimming once and twice a week in calm clear aqua water. This year, we have managed to swim one time. Beaches have been washed away. There was already one (subtropical) storm named Andrea, and I’m including pictures here that demonstrate her tempestuous tantrums. It was fun taking the photographs because it was a beautiful sunny, hot day with gales blowing out of the east. The Atlantic boiled and sparkled beneath the early May sunshine. I’m sure these photographs will supply me with ammunition for my pastel drawings this summer.