New Mexico to Missouri

To be precise, we are now parked in Lake of the Ozarks.  In the last several days we have certainly put the miles behind us after leaving Albuquerque,  pictured below are the Sandi Mountains.

Not far from the city we noticed what looked like a ghost town from the highway.  We could see a church and some stores, abandoned and in disrepair.  It was the town of Cuervo.  I researched it later and learned that we were correct, it was a ghost town.  The construction of Highway 40 split the town.  It had a post office until 2011. 
We traveled into Texas, just a small section of it, on Highway 54.   At one point I happened to glance up ( I must admit here that my eyes are not always on the road as I am not the one driving) and saw about a 14 foot bowl-legged cowboy statue standing near the side of the road with a pistol in his right hand.  My immediate thought, especially when I noted the gun, was that there was nothing cute about him- I found the gun offensive.  If I lived any where near that cowboy I would want him removed.  But then I realized that we were in Texas.  Sometimes it is necessary to let things be, as the events in Charlottesville this past Saturday taught us.  Just not worth people loosing their lives over some issues.  By reacting we are only adding fuel to the fire.

Most of the land we traveled over in Texas and Oklahoma was over desert-type land sparse of much vegetation, good only for cattle grazing.  Pictured above is a feedlot in Texas, the largest I think that we have ever seen.  It seemed to go on for miles, and the smell was awful.  We spent that night in Delhart Texas, and the smell could faintly be noticed from there.  I had to find out more about that town, as the area we stayed in seemed rather down in the mouth.  What I learned about the town was that it was the center of the Dust Bowl, an area adversely affected by drought and dust storms during the 1930s.

On a much sweeter and lighter note, we drove through the town of Liberal, Kansas and saw the statue of Dorothy ( from the Wizard of  Oz) in three areas of town.  In the 1980s the exhibit "The Land of Oz" settled here.  It has a recreation of Dorthy Gate's home and the famed Yellow Brick Road.

Finally we are out of the dry regions of scrub and sagebrush, starting to see prairie land.  Still lots of cattle on the scene, but now there are crops as corn, milo and wheat.  We are now in the Flint Hills of Kansas, also known as the Bluestem Pasture Region of Kansas.  At a road rest area we found an interpretive sign which said that here was the "world's greatest beef cattle feeding grounds".  In the springtime southwestern cattle are shipped here for fattening up.

We enjoyed the gentle rolling hills of eastern Kansas, but even more so the higher hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri!  Good to be back home.  We will be spending a day at Lake of the Ozarks before heading north.  Rain has been following us for several days now so the temperatures are a bit cooler.