Day 7 – Tucumcari, NM to Crockett, TX

Today we continued along Route 66 (also known as Highway 40) to Amarillo, Texas.  After stopping for a coffee in Amarillo, we headed south along Highway 287 to Wichita Falls, TX.  This route was uneventful as we planned to put in a lot of miles  in today so we could get into the south of Texas by night fall.  We stopped in Wichita to take a few pictures of the Falls and then continued along Highway 287 and bypassed  Dallas, TX and thus avoided the heavy Saturday traffic around the city.

Wichita Falls

Red Soil Northern Texas

Most of the the northern part of Texas was flat, dry and barren and if there was a theme to the landscape it would be “wind turbines and desert”.   Wind turbines dotted the landscape all over this dry flat desert with not much to see but miles and miles of desert.

But as we drove south of Dallas, TX the landscape started to get greener and looked more like Ontario, with scattered farms and homes everywhere. At one point along the highway to Palestine, TX , we encountered a swarm of bugs that we could see flying down the highway towards us like a cloud of smoke until they splattered all over our windshield.  We are not sure what type of insects they were but it was quite unreal.

We arrived in Palestine as it was getting dark and checked out a few motels only to find there were only a few rooms left in town.  The last room at the Super 8 was a smoking room which I looked at (and smelled) but decided I didn’t want to smell smoke all night long.  The caretaker said that all the rooms in town were sold out due a bikers convention and a few other events that were happening in town, so we decided to continue driving to the next town.  This was a challenge as Palestine is surrounded by a loop highway with all of the other highways connecting to the loop.  After driving almost the entire loop we eventually found our exit off Loop 256 and headed toward the town of Crockett again along highway 287.

It was 830 pm. on Saturday night and we still hadn’t found a place to stay but we were surprised to count six cemeteries along this stretch of highway.  It was a bit odd !  We finally arrived at Crockett, TX and took a room at the Knight Inn which was our worst room yet but there wasn’t anything else around.  We drove a record 970 km. today so we had driven enough for the day.

We were anxious to move on so we were up at  7 am. (5 am. BC time) to start our journey to New Orleans !