Road Trip

My husband and I decided to take a driving trip to visit my mother. We have traditionally enjoyed spending long hours together in a car and this time proved no different. There are no distractions (except the scenery) … no phones, no computers, no TV … just the two of us chatting. As much as we enjoyed the time together, the trip is a very tiring eight hour drive and, unless we have something large to take up there, we probably will fly in the future. We loved seeing the landscape again. The trip took us through Texas farm country. Although, these days they are farming more than winter wheat and alfalfa, they are farming the wind! And there are more oil fields being pumped.

Another plus in driving is being able to stop at road side restaurants for American fare extraordinaire! Our favorite is Buck’s in Sweetwater. Sweetwater is in the middle of nowhere on I-20. Buck’s has the best chicken-fried steak anywhere! The steaks are hand-battered and cook up with a thick crust that soaks up the cream gravy. Until this trip, they have always had pickled watermelon rinds on the salad bar. Pickling watermelon rinds is very labor intensive, but very worth it. It is one of those things that are falling by the wayside as too much trouble in our hectic fast paced world. I remember pickling watermelon rinds with my husband’s grandmother. We carefully trimmed the red meat and the outer skin off the rinds, leaving just a little pink where the red had been. Then you add lots of sugar and other stuff, put in jars and pressure cook the jars to seal. In the cold of winter, the watermelon rinds are a welcome reminder of the summer to come.
The sunsets in that part of the country are extraordinary because it is so flat that you can stand in one spot and turn around and see the sunset from a 360 point of view. Yellows melt into oranges into violets into blues into indigo into blues into violets into oranges into yellow.

While we were in Lubbock, we saw the partial moon eclipse, which I tried to take pictures of, but my camera just doesn’t quite have that capability. The moon was huge on the horizon, almost full and a brilliant orange as the earth’s shadow passed over it. It was awesome to see! We could even see the topography aka the old man in the moon.