Please note, you can click on any of these photos to see a larger version of the photo.

I had wanted to do a time series from Virginia that showed how the landscape changed as we drove. Sadly, I had the settings wrong on the camera till Oklahoma. I then started a series of following behind the Subaru as we drove west:

Following the Subaru 1

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The east coast is covered in trees while the West is mostly desert. The transition from one eco system to the other happens largely as one drives across Oklahoma. Arkansas had been as green as Virginia, and the first few miles of Oklahoma had been the same. But as we crossed the state, the trees thinned out. By the time we crossed Texas and entered New Mexico, we were into real desert country:

Following the Subaru 8

Following the Subaru 9

Following the Subaru 10

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Following the Subaru 12

Texas, of course, had been flat, but after we’d been driving through New Mexico for about an hour, the first hills began to appear:

Following the Subaru 13

Following the Subaru 14

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Following the Subaru 36

After this, we parked the Volvo at a gas station and we rearranged the items in the cars so we could all go together to Madrid, New Mexico. This was a bit of a sidetrack, as we had to go north on 17, away from 40, but we all wanted to see the town where Laura had met so many  talented artists during the summer of 2007 and, of course, she was looking forward to getting back there and seeing her old friends.

I’ve some photos of Madrid that I’ll post separately.

Please note, you can click on any of these photos to see a larger version of the photo.

We woke up at a hotel in Oklahoma. We completely forgot that it was Halloween, till late that night someone reminded us. The hotel was only $35 a night. All the hotels we stayed out tended to be empty. I don’t know if that was because of the recession or because we were simply off season.

Packing the car in the morning, in Oklahoma

I woke up and stepped outside the hotel and I saw the longest truck I’d ever seen, carrying the longest blade I’d ever seen. i was so stupid that I didn’t realize what I was looking at, though Laura knew immediately: it was the blade for a windmill. As we drove down Interstate 40 that day, we began to see the first wind farms:

A portion of a windfarm in Oklahoma

It’s impossible to take a photo of a whole wind farm, because they stretch out over 20 or 30 miles. You can only get a  sense of the farm from a distance. When you come over a hill, you’ll see faint silver sticks on the horizon, far ahead of you, and far apart from each other. They come in clusters, like the one pictured here. It is easy enough to take a picture of any one of the clusters, but not the whole farm, since miles separate each cluster.

This seems like such an intelligent way to generate electricity, I hope America makes these wind farms a high priority in the near future. I’m sad to say that during the whole trip from Virginia to Phoenix, Arizona, I only saw 6 wind farms. And there is so much open land out west, and so many mountain tops that funnel the wind into reliable currents, it is clear this is a resource that America has not yet done much to use.

As we got into western Oklahoma, we were increasingly driving across Indian land. There were many tourist stops with Indian themes. There was some public art in these places.

At a stop on Indian land in Oklahoma

I spent 3 days following behind Laura and Dave. They were driving the Subura, and I was driving in the Volvo. Both cars were packed with stuff. Mine was so stuffed that when I added my personal belongings to the passenger seat, I often was completely locked in, with no spare room except for the drivers seat. I got used to using the side mirrors much more than I usually do. They were my only way to see what was behind the car.

Both cars were completely packed with stuff

Please note, you can click on any of these photos to see a larger version of the photo.

We left Charlottesville on October 29th. We were in a hurry to get out west, so we flew through Tennesse and Arkansas. We did 495 miles the first day and just about 700 miles the second day.

The first night, we stayed at this hotel in Tennesse, about an hour east of Nashville:

Hotel in Tennesse that we stayed during the first night of the trip

Every night we stayed at a hotel we needed to sneak in the cat (Avrj) without the hotel staff noticing.

Every night we had to sneak the cat into various hotels

The kitten often got freaked out after a few hours in the car. So we would stop occasionally and let it wander around, while on a leash. Laura bought the cat a variety of bow ties.

Avrj with a terrific new neck piece

We had absolutely no interest in Arkansas, so we zoomed across it in just 5 hours. To its credit, it had some terrific rest areas we could stop and have some lunch.

At a rest stop in Arkansas

As soon as we got to Oklahoma, we found a hotel and stopped for the night. We had done nearly 700 miles.