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