Through The Eye Of The Storm

During our trip through the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas, we have literally gone through a storm, with a lot of rain, thunder and lightning, tornadoes and flooding leaving death and destruction in its wake. But we’re OK, thanks for asking!

I even checked cnn.com today and the weather in these 3 states was the top story (yes, seemingly more important than Britney Spears).

In Arkansas, as we drove across the eastern part of the state, we saw what appeared to be huge lakes on either side of the interstate, but what in fact we’re flooded agricultural fields. Sometimes, we would see roads that would just disappear under water. Luckily, however, Interstate 40 must have been built on raised ground, so we didn’t experience any delays whatsoever.

In Oklahoma, we must have been driving through the roughest part of the storm. It was pouring down heavily and I was very glad when we arrived at our destination, because the road we were using had a lot of truckers, and it just didn’t feel very safe at all.

Driving through Texas panhandle today, the sun was out, but the winds were blowing hard. So hard that it made driving the RV quite difficult. You could see the trucks swerving with the wind. Not very comforting seeing that some of these trucks are 2 carriages long and can easily take you out.

The scenery has also changed quite a lot. In Arkansas, you still had a lot of trees, and a lot of colour, especially in the west of the state. As you go through Oklahoma, the trees get smaller and more sparse. The ground went from green to yellow. In Texas, there are no more trees, everything’s dusty and, because of the wind today, tumbleweeds were blowing across the highway.

Although we’ve been traveling alongside Route 66 for day now, we haven’t exactly been ON Route 66 yet. We’ve been waiting to go along some of the more scenic sections of the historic route in New Mexico and Arizona. And we enter New Mexico tomorrow, and should be staying the night in Santa Fe, if all goes as planned. If anyone has seen the Pixar movie “Cars”, then you would understand the desire to get off the interstate.

Something interesting has happened to us a couple of times, once in Arkansas and once in Texas. In Arkansas, we were stopped at a Wal-Mart to stock up on food, and we were looking for some wine, but couldn’t find the alcohol section. We asked an employee and she told us that we were in a dry county, meaning no alcohol could be sold in stores, supermarket and the like. Funny thing is that you could go to a restaurant and order a glass of wine, no problem. Go figure! Then today, we were in a restaurant, and Margreet wanted to order a glass of wine with dinner, but again, we were DENIED. We were, evidently, in a dry area and could not buy alcohol. Now I understand why there’s so little alcohol abuse in this country!