Cow Report #7

Christmas in Los Angeles

Day 13: Tucumcari to Tulsa!
Day 12: Flagstaff to Tucumcari
Day 11: LA to Flagstaff
Day 10: Cats and Friends
Day 9: Christmas Day
Day 8: Computer Upgrades
Day 7: Lord of The Rings (Again!)
Day 6: My Old Neighborhood
Day 5: Lord of The Rings
Day 4: Visit the Home Office
Day 3: A Very Long Drive to LA
Day 2: Tucumcari to Flagstaff (Well, almost!)
Day 1: Tulsa to Tucumcari
Itinerary

Day 13: Tucumcari to Tulsa!

The skies on this last day of my journey started out overcast, and didn't get any better as the day progressed. No more clear blue skies, but at least the weather stayed dry all the way to Tulsa.

My first point of interest on this final leg of the return home was the "Quality Beef" feed lot on the west side of Wildorado, Texas. This feed lot has the highest concentration of cows anywhere along the route, and there were plenty of guests this time around. I felt kind of sorry for the cows; they were all standing around on the little dirt mounds at the center of their pens, since the melting snow had left the rest of the pens wet and muddy. Considering where these cows are headed, though, I guess a little mud and water are the least of their problems!

Some of you may have seen photos of a row of old Cadillacs planted in a field. Turns out that field of Cadillacs is located just west of Amarillo, alongside the old Route 66. I've passed by that field seven times since relocating to Tulsa, and on this eighth time, I decided to stop on my way back to Tulsa and take my own photos.

Considering that this was the eighth time I've driven by Cadillac Field, I would have to stop on the day when field was at its muddiest! Since this was also a working cow pasture, I'm sure there was a good deal of cow s**t mixed in with the dirt, water and snow. In fact, there were cows in the field this day, but they were too far away to get good pictures, and I didn't feel like wading around in any more mud just for a few more cow photos! As it was, when I finally returned to the truck, I spent as much time cleaning mud off my boots as I'd spent photographing the Cadillacs.

Further east of Amarillo, I pulled off the freeway to drive through Groom on old Route 66. In addition to the Leaning Tower of Groom, which you saw earlier, Groom is home to what's claimed to be the largest cross in the western hemisphere:

I also stopped by the tower again in order to photograph the garage that the tower seems to be advertising:

That auto/truck service center remains an enigma to me; it doesn't look abandoned, but I've never seen any vehicles in front of it, either!

By the time I reached the Oklahoma border, the sun was setting. Since the rest of the trip was conducted in darkness, I don't have any more sights to report on. However, I would like to put in a good word for the Texaco station at the corner of Business I-40 (Old Route 66) and North Lusk Avenue in Elk City, Oklahoma. Elk City is about halfway between Tulsa and Tucumcari, and makes a great stop for food and gas. This Texaco station has become my stop of choice for refueling; the prices are decent, the restrooms are clean and they have a good selection of sodas and munchies. (And shame on me for saying this, but there always seems to be very attractive women working at this station whenever I stop by!)

Well, when I walked into the store to pay for my gas, Ben and Jessica (above) told me that since I was their tenth customer, I won a free six-pack of soda! Deja vu: last year, during my summer trip to Los Angeles last year, I was also the tenth customer and won a six-pack of soda! My lucky gas station! If you ever need gas in Elk City, this is the place to stop!

Thank you, Ben and Jessica!

I arrived in Tulsa about 10pm local time, and saw very little evidence of the snowfall from earlier in the week. The weather was very windy, but surprisingly warm; in the lower 60s. You could see a few piles of snow here and there, but otherwise there wasn't much evidence to show that Tulsa had a white Christmas!

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Day 12: Flagstaff to Tucumcari

Day 2 of the eastbound trip was much more routine than the westbound segment! The weather (always my primary concern on these trips!) was great! Clear and sunny. But approaching Meteor Crater, I saw what appeared to be ground fog (or at least very low clouds) on the horizon. After driving into these clouds I starting getting brief, localized snow flurries! This was very surprising; the weather reports said there wasn't supposed to be this kind of problem today! This weird weather continued till just past Winslow, and then again approaching Holbrook. Reaching Holbrock , I spotted a possible explanation for this strange weather: the Cholla Power Plant was busy, with lots of vapor coming out of the cooling towers, smokestacks and even the ground! Maybe this was creating the localized micro-climate problems, since the weather cleared up quite nicely east of Holbrook. Sunny and dry; what more could I ask for, except perhaps someone to be riding with me to keep me company!

By the time I reached Grants — the scene of the westbound trip's weather problems — I was having a very hard time staying awake. So I decided to stop for lunch at the Subway and grab some lunch and lots of soda. The Subway had Country & Western music playing in the background; one particular song had the (frequent) refrain "John Deere Green". I couldn't make out much of the rest of the lyrics; I wonder what that song was about?

The remainder of the trip was completely uneventful. After settling into my motel room and watching a couple more episodes of The Sopranos, I got back in the truck and drive south of Tucumcari about five miles or so, past some hills which blocked out the lights from the town. I spent a few minutes just looking up at a sky filled with stars! You certainly can't see skies like this in Los Angeles, or even Tulsa. But out here, with no moon or city lights to get in the way, the Milky Way was clearly visible, along with hundreds of stars. A truly awesome way to end the day!

The awesome majesty of the star filled sky was somewhat diminished when I decided it was time to return to the motel and discovered that the road side was far muddier than I'd thought! I almost had to call the auto club to pull my truck back to the road, but fortunately the Explorer took care of me; after much spinning of wheels, I was able to nudge the truck back to the road.

How does the Cow Report get updated while I'm on the road? I'm versatile;I can create the necessary mess anywhere! Here's a look at tonight's working environment (I had a similar setup in Los Angeles, although a slightly smaller desk space):

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Day 11: LA to Flagstaff

I made it! I'm all checked into my motel room in Flagstaff! (Good thing I planned ahead and reserved a room before leaving Tulsa; the motel is full right now!) After dinner at the IHOP next door I'm relaxing in front of my laptop with HBO's series The Sopranos in the background. Kind of a restful, relaxing evening after a pleasant, uneventful trip. I've made this trip so often (four times in the last two years) that the word "routine" comes to mind.

Actually, leaving LA was a little stressful. I–10 was congested around the Pomona area, and the I–15 was slow for several miles at the point where it approaches the merge with I–215. The I–15 was also slow leaving the Victorville area because of some ongoing construction. Traffic problems like this are one of the big reasons I don't miss LA!

I was also very surprised coming over the El Cajon pass into Victorville and seeing a brown layer of haze in the desert!!! I thought this kind of air pollution was limited to the LA basin, and I'm very saddened to see it spread to my deserts!

Earlier this evening I checked the weather for Arizona and New Mexico; conditions look great! Clear, sunny skies with no rain or snow in the forecast. So it looks like tomorrow's drive will be routine, also!

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Day 10: Cats and Friends

My last full day in Los Angeles began by having breakfast with my friend Kirsten, a member of the ULC. We met at a local Westchester restaurant called "The Coffee Company" which has great breakfasts and lunches! A few years ago Kirsten acquired a cute little Abyssinian kitten which she named "Olivia". Since I lived in the same neighborhood, and was known to be a cat person (I had two cats of my own for almost 18 years), I became Kirsten's official cat-sitter. After breakfast, we drove over to her place so I could pick up a computer system I'd loaned her a couple years earlier, but which has been replaced by a slick new laptop computer. This gave me the chance to meet Olivia again!

Kirsten's fiancee Chris is also a cat person, and they've recently added a new member to the family: "Greystoke":

Greystoke is actually related to Olivia: if I understand the situation correctly, Greystoke's grandmother is Olivia's mother. But Greystoke's father is a neighborhood cat, so Greystoke is not a purebred Abyssinian; unlike Olivia, who is. But they're both very cute cats, but Greystoke is much friendlier!

After visiting Kirsten, I drove down to Fullerton in Orange County to spend some time with my friend Chen Low and his family. Chen and I were co-workers at one time in the past, and we've kept in touch since going separate ways many years ago. We had lunch at a local In-N-Out Burger; I'd been waiting to have a Double-Double with cheese and fries for a long time! (In-N-Out is a local chain and doesn't have any locations here in Tulsa!)

Finally, I came back to Westchester to visit my former next-door neighbor, Alice (below, left) and her oldest daughter, Donna (below, right). Donna is a doctor with a practice in New Jersey, and was in town for Christmas.

Alice and I had a great arrangement when I was living in Los Angeles: I kept her VCR programmed and she would fix dinner from time to time. When I left LA for Tulsa two years ago, Alice was having serious pains in her lower body and was having trouble getting around. But she's had both hips replaced in the last two years and the results are remarkable; when I saw her this evening she was walking around with no problem and seemed to be in excellent spirits! I'm very happy that the new hips seems to have cleared up the pain that she was experiencing when I left!

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Day 9: Christmas Day

Christmas this year was very special, because it was the first time in quite a while that the entire family celebrated the day together. My sister Karin hosted the family Christmas get-together. (That's Karin on the right, handing out Santa's gifts.) I played shuttle, picking up my dad and brother and bringing them over to Karin's place. We were also joined by Chris, one of Karin's college friends, and Chris' new companion animal (below):

We started the festivities by opening presents (of course!). Here's Mike, my brother-in-law, helping my niece Kira with one of the packages:

After the presents were presented, I took off for a while to visit my colleague Ed (you met him earlier when I wrote about our company's new mainframe computer) and his family. Ed and his family have a house with a great view of the San Pedro / Long Beach area. Although I'm very happy with my move to Tulsa, Ed's view does make me realize that Tulsa does lack a few things that Los Angeles can brag about:

• Oceans and ports. (We do have the Arkansas River flowing along the west side of Tulsa!)
• Mountains and hills that allow great views of oceans and ports to exist. (There is Turkey Hill on the west side of Tulsa, across from the Arkansas River. But I think the Williams Building, now the Bank of Oklahoma Building, is taller!)

After spending some fun time with Ed and his family, it was back to Karin's place for dinner. Kira, with a little help from karin:

had fixed turkey, ham and a boatload of fixin's! The food was good and the companionship was great, making for a wonderful Christmas day!

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Day 8: Computer Upgrades

Computers are a big part of my life, and every two years or so I usually perform a major upgrade on my home PC. Over time, I collect enough surplus parts to build complete systems. One of these surplus systems has been on loan to my friend Mimi, who you met earlier in this report. Just before starting this trip, I upgraded my home system from an 866MHz Pentium III to a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. I brought the surplus CPU, motherboard and memory with me to Los Angeles and spent this day installing this hardware into Mimi's system. In turn, the 350MHz Pentium II and motherboard that came out of Mimi's computer will upgrade a second system of mine that had been sitting in a friend's garage and is now in the back of my truck.

In addition to upgrading Mimi's hardware, I also installed a copy of Windows XP on her system. That proved to be an interesting challenge, since Mimi's PC wouldn't read the XP CD, for some reason. Fortunately, I was able to network my laptop to Mimi's system and perform the installation using the CD-ROm from my laptop!

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Day 7: Lord of The Rings (Again!)

Monday morning I called one of the developers in our Tulsa office to see how things were going in the office. Surprise! Tulsa looks like it will have a white Christmas! Brad told me that Tulsa was being bombarded with snow; a couple of inches already, with more on the way. I had to smile when I told Brad that I was looking out the window of my hotel room at clear blue skies!

Today was a day to visit friends. Lunch in Cerritos with a friend that goes all the way back to my Continental Days. After lunch, I was planning to visit my friend Ian in Huntington Beach. Along the way I stopped by ASIWHQ ("ASI World Headquarters"), a small software company that I used to work for many, many years ago. It must have been a slow day at ASI, since the only one in the office was Kathy, the receptionist/office manager, and two of her puppies.

I met Ian at the office where he works, a small company that is currently working with robotics technology of various sorts. Ian showed be some interesting technology from the 60s: an "optical encoder". This is an analog device that is used by robots to keep track of the position of their moving parts. The encoders that Ian is working with use light bulbs shining through rotating disks as part of the mechanism. Unfortunately, the light bulbs have a tendency to burn out, but nobody makes replacements anymore. So Ian's project is to replace the light bulbs with LEDs.

After closing up the office for the day, Ian mentioned that he wanted to see Twin Towers. So I wound up seeing the movie second time in three days. This time around, particularly after Karin's commentary on Saturday, the film was much more comprehensible!

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Day 6: My Old Neighborhood

Sunday was the first day of the trip that had no specific events planned. I had given some thought to driving up to Lancaster, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. This was the town where I grew up, and the weather was great for a little side trip like this. The sky was clear blue, and visibility must have been 100 miles or more; you could easily see the San Bernardino mountains with no problem at all. A very rare, clear day. But I had told my sister that I would join her for her weekly visit to my dad, and I didn't feel like canceling that visit. So instead, I decided to spend some time sightseeing through the neighborhood where I used to live.

Starting with a drive by the beach along Vista Del Mar. I could see north all the way up the coast, way past Malibu and south all the way to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I started to feel some twinge of regret about my relocation, since we don't have views like this back in Tulsa!

But then I decided to drive through the old Play Del Rey neighborhood (Manchester & Pershing) and was kind of shocked. The Acapulco restaurant that I enjoyed from time to time is gone, replaced by a construction site. A huge new apartment complex has been built on the west side of the former Acapulco, replacing an older, smaller and more subdued apartment complex. And that wasn't the only new construction, either; the old Bob's Big Boy, which later became the new home of JT's, is now a big hole in the ground. I assume that it's becoming an ugly new apartment complex, also.

Seeing these changes makes me sad, angry and kind of glad that I'm out of here. Given the population growth here in the LA area, I guess these kinds of changes are inevitable. You have to put all these new people somewhere, and they can't all afford $600K houses in Westchester! So you tear down the houses and build apartments, and the older apartments get torn down to make way for denser apartments. This creates "affordable" housing of a sort, but packing all these people together doesn't help quality of life issues!

I finished up my tour with a late breakfast at "The Grinder". This is just a local coffee shop, but it's been one of my favorite restaurants for many years. Breakfast was good, and the place hasn't changed much, but I didn't recognize any of the staff.

With breakfast out of the way, I drove down to my sister's place, and then we drove over to my dad's condo. We were surprised to learn that one of my aunts was going to drop by for a brief visit; we didn't know Sue was in town! We had a pleasant surprise visit.

After returning to Karin's place, I finished up the day with another visit to my friend Raj.

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Day 5: Lord of The Rings

Saturday morning I joined my sister Karin, her husband Mike and their daughter Kira for a trip to Lord of The Rings: The Twin Towers. I confess that I haven't read Tolkien's trilogy; well, that's not completely true, since many years ago I started Fellowship Of The Ring, but I never even made it halfway through that book. So I'm not really very knowledgeable about the series, and I was a little confused by the film. There were about three or four major story lines, and the film was continually cutting between them. For example, at first I wasn't sure whether there was one wizard who was sometimes good and sometimes bad, or two separate wizards. Fortunately, Karin has read the series many times, so she was able to help correct my confusion!

I spent the rest of the day with Karin and family. Karin has always had an interest in animals of various sorts, and she has quite a collection of critters at the moment: five cats, a dog, a tortoise and various snakes. She also has a horse, but Ace lives at a stable and not at the house. Here are a few of the members of Karin's Kritter Kollection:

The two pictures on the right showcase two of Karin's Corn Snakes. They're actually kind of cute and fun to hold. Just in case you're interested, here's a closer look at the little critters:

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Day 4: Visit the Home Office

My social calendar for my first full day back in Los Angeles began with lunch at Cozymel's. This is an upscale, trendy Mexican-style restaurant on the El Segundo side of the border with Manhattan Beach. Just before I left for Tulsa at the end of 2000, some friends of mine and I met for a farewell lunch at Cozymel's. The food was good and the ambiance pleasant, so it seemed like a fun place for a reunion lunch. The experience this time around was just as much fun as two years ago; perhaps this can be the start of a new tradition! Here's our little lunch group:

Left to right we have Mimi, Stephenie, Nancy and Mike. Your's truly in the background.

After finishing lunch I spent the rest of the afternoon at my employer's home office.I haven't seen any of my colleagues in the last year, so this was a treat. I also got to see the new mainframe computer equipment that we've purchased this year! Here's my colleague Ed at the Service Element of our new IBM z800 zSeries Server:

It's been a very long time since computers were huge collections of big boxes with panel after panel of flashing lights. Inside this box are two IBM Thinkpad laptop computers that are used to perform all of the maintenance and diagnostic functions that used to be the reason why all of those switches and flashing lights existed.

This photo above shows the IBM "Shark" storage system (the big box in the foreground) that was also recently acquired. These two boxes, combined, have about 400 times the storage capacity and at least 250 times the CPU power of all of the hardware that we had at Continental Airlines, my first job after graduating from college in 1977. And Continental's collection of equipment tool up over half the 14th floor of the building we were in!

This day concluded with a visit to my friend Raj, and the chance to see the new big-screen HDTV system that he's acquired. It's very impressive, and definitely the way to watch DVDs!

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Day 3: A Very Long Drive to LA

This is where I should have been at the end of yesterday's drive:

You're looking down westbound I-40; the snow-capped mountain in the background, just to the right of the Interstate, is San Francisco Mountain, with a peak elevation of just over 12,500 feet. Flagstaff is located at the left-hand base of this mountain. It was supposed to be my overnight stop between days 2 and 3, but as you read below, the weather gods had different ideas.

Although this day began as cold as day 2 ended, there was still a very big difference:

Blue skies!

As you can see from the photo on the right, the clouds that caused so much trouble the previous day with their load of snow had disappeared. Given the orientation my truck had while parked overnight, the rising sun had melted the snow and ice from the driver's side and the rear. However, the windshield and passenger side, being on the shady side of the sunrise, needed scraping before I could hit the road. I decided to cheat a little bit by scraping just enough snow from that side of the truck so that the windows weren't opaque. Then I repositioned the truck so that the shady side of the vehicle caught some sunlight. After a few minutes of soaking some rays, the rest of the snow and ice brushed off quite easily.

Although the weather hinted at the start of a much easier drive than the conclusion of yesterday's adventure, the optimism didn't last very long. Just after I entering the westbound I–40 at exit 85, traffic slowed to a crawl. I'm talking a stop-and-go pace as bad as anything I've experienced on LA freeways! I called the New Mexico road conditions hotline, but they had no information on any problems anywhere on I-40.

After four agonizing miles of crawling along the freeway, traffic was diverted off the Interstate at exit 81. Our processing of cars and big-rigs wound up traveling along what was once Route 66 for several miles, eventually reentering the Interstate at exit 72. Driving along Route 66, it looks like there was a jackknifed big-rig that was blocking the roadway. However, that might not have been the only problem; when I reentered the freeway I could see that eastbound traffic was being diverted off at exit 72. This meant that the freeway was closed in both directions.

Once I was back on the Interstate, the rest of the the trip through New Mexico was completely uneventful. The roads had been plowed, and were pretty much dry, as a matter of fact. No problems maintaining the 75 mph that's the posted speed limit in New Mexico and Arizona!

Crossing the border, it was obvious that Arizona had done just as good a job of clearing the Interstate as New Mexico. But between the border and Holbrook I counted three overturned big-rigs; one in the median strip and the other two off the side of the freeway. There was no activity at all around these wrecks, and couldn't help thinking of them as some gigantic form of road-kill! I assume that these were victims of the previous day's weather conditions. The snow and ice were accompanied by very strong winds, and I can see how this combination could have a serious impact on something that has a large sail area like a semi-trailer.

Just past Holbrook I saw an interesting billboard; it read:

Stop Terrorism:
Get U.S. Out of the U.N.!

I haven't seen that slogan in a very long time. The billboard didn't list any specific organization, but the slogan used to be one of the rallying cries of the John Birch Society. I wonder if they're still around?

Also spotted around the Holbrook area were cows! I spotted several small herds, and I felt kind of sorry for these poor critters standing (or laying) around in 25-degree temperatures. I'm assuming that these critters had to spend the previous day outdoors in the snow, and a subsequent conversation with my sister supports this assumption. Karin tells me that as long as critters like cattle, goats and sheep have food and some sort of shelter from the wind, they can do quite well in conditions we humans might consider a bit extreme.

After a quick fuel stop in Flagstaff, I was back on the Interstate. The segment between Flagstaff and Kingman was uneventful. At around mile 84 I spotted a partially-constructed building that looked like a large garage or small warehouse. What caught my eye was that I'd seen this building on last year's Christmas trip, and it didn't look like any progress had been made during this year.

At Kingman I stopped to top off the fuel supply and have a bit of dinner. By the time I was finished with this break and back on I-40, the sun had set. With the rest of the trip conducted in darkness, there's not much that I can report seeing. I finally hit the LA area around 8pm or so, which was sufficiently past the rush-hour traffic that the freeways were flowing nice and smoothly.

Today's drive covered just over 740 miles. I think that's the most miles I've ever covered in a single day. It was a long day, but at least it was a relatively easy drive conducted under very good weather and road conditions. As opposed to yesterday, which could have been a very long day under very difficult weather and road conditions. If nothing else, today's drive suggests that I could do the drive from Tulsa to Los Angeles in two days instead of three!

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Day 2: Tucumcari to Flagstaff
(Well, Almost!)

Today's segment started out with cold temperatures and clear blue skies. Here's a view taken just east of Tucumcari, looking west along I-40 towards Albuquerque:

The day ended with one of those two qualities: cold temperatures! Unfortunately, the clear blue skies were nowhere to be seen:

Before leaving Tucumcari I'd checked the Weather Channel and some of the local stations for weather and road conditions. Everything was supposed to be fine until Albuquerque, but once west of ABQ winter weather conditions were expected. Another storm was supposed to move into western New Mexico from Arizona during the day. I-40 between Grants and Gallup had been closed for several hours during the night because of icing conditions. That stretch of the route has the highest elevations of today's segment, so any winter weather would cause more problems there than anywhere else.

The great weather that started out in Tucumcari actually lasted well past Albuquerque. In fact, I was starting to think that maybe the weather folks were wrong, especially since I was not seeing any eastbound cars with snow on them!

Unfortunately, about 12 miles east of Grants the snow started falling. Very light flurries at first, but they got bigger as the road climbed the mountains towards Grants. By the time I reached Grants itself, the Interstate was definitely accumulating snow, and traffic was crawling along at 30-40 MPH, with very limited visibility. (There were a few BDSH drivers, though; many in big rigs, passing by in the fast lane at much faster speeds.) Since I was about 300 miles from Flagstaff at that point, I was looking at possibly as much as 10 more hours of driving, assuming these conditions persisted along the rest of the route.

At the exit 79, six miles west of Grants, with weather conditions deteriorating, much of the traffic took the offramp. I decided to continue onward, but just then my truck started sliding around the roadway. I managed to retain enough control to make it to the offramp without hitting any of the other traffic. Once off the freeway, I carefully and very slowly made it to a Love's travel stop and breathed a big sigh of relief. After making a critical pit stop, I sat in the truck and figured what to do next. Where I was parked was about the highest point around. If I put on the chains, I'd be better equipped to handle icy roads. Also, My location was pretty much at the summit, so if I could make it just a few more miles and get to lower elevations, the road conditions might be much better. But then I called the New Mexico road conditions hotline and found that I-40 westbound was closed at Gallup because of an accident and hazardous materials spill just inside the Arizona border.

That news really forced my decision. HazMat spills can take a long time to clean up, and who knows what might happen to the weather in the meantime; it might improve while waiting for the road to open, but it might get worse as the sun set. I thought about going back to Albuquerque, but that was 100 miles or so behind me, and the storm was moving in that direction. Would I be fighting bad weather in that direction? I called one of the motels in Grants and booked a room for the night.

An hour, hour and a half or so after sliding around I-40 I'd checked into my room and was sitting at an adjacent Subway having a late lunch/early dinner. Although the snowfall had lightened up when I sat down with my sandwich, it was getting heavy again by the time I finished. Funny note: at one point while I was eating and typing notes into my Palm, I spotted a lady walking her dog in the snow. Was it a warm-weather dog? If it was, the poor little pooch was having an awfully hard time finding some foliage in which to conduct its business!

Now, at almost 7pm, I'm sitting here wondering if I made the right decision to overnight in Grants. I–40 reopened sometime between 4:30 and 5pm; by that time the snowfall here in this area was pretty much coming to an end. But if I'd continued on I-40 and made it all the way to Gallup, I would have had to wait around there for a few hours for the road to reopen. And I had no idea what the conditions around Flagstaff are like. At the moment, I'm satisfied with my decision. The latest weather reports indicate that tomorrow will be clear, or at least dry, so road conditions should be pretty good. It does mean a long day of driving, though; about 730 miles. But I can do that in a day; I'll just try to get an early start!

Note: "BDSH" = "Brain Dead S**t Head".

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Day 1: Tulsa to Tucumcari

First, my apologies for posting this day's report a day late. AT&T has no local dial-up number for the Tucumcari area, and long-distance phone calls through the motel are expensive! This day's activity report will be posted when I get to Flagstaff.

Well, who would have thought it possible: in the middle of December, driving through the Texas panhandle with the windows down? While today's adventure didn't exactly turn out that way, it came close! My truck was showing an outside temperature of 75 as I crossed from Oklahoma into Texas! Beautiful weather, but it didn't last; by the time I arrived in Amarillo the temperature had dropped ten degrees, and as I left Texas and entered New Mexico, the temperature was down to 50! I encountered light sprinkles around the Amarillo area, but nothing serious, and the skies dried up long before I reached the New Mexico border.

The first cows that I spotted on this trip were in a very small herd of perhaps 8 to 10 members, spotted at I-40 milepost 166; about 47 miles east of Oklahoma City. I spotted a much larger herd around milepost 154, I think. From that point on, cows were generally plentiful along the route. Not lots of cows, but enough to be interesting.

I've written about cows quite a bit in previous Reports, but how many cows have you actually seen? The skeptics among you might actually wonder if I'm making up all of this bovine activity. As my boss (often) says, one picture is worth a thousand words. So here are some pictures that I took earlier today in a field just east of Groom, Texas. Real cows! And, as a bonus, the Leaning Tower of Groom! I'm not sure what the tower's official name might be, but it seems to be a marketing gimmick promoting a car/truck repair facility. Funny thing, in all of my trips back and forth from LA, I've never actually seen any people or vehicles at this shop. But, it doesn't look abandoned, either!

Another surprise today: the number of green pastures that I've spotted in western Oklahoma and eastern Texas! I would have thought that all of the pasture would be sleeping for the winter by now, but no; some of the cows have fresh greens to eat! This must be a pretty mild winter?

Another mild surprise: the market for truck drivers seems to be a little weak these days. During previous trips, I noticed that just about every 18-wheeler's trailer had a sign on the back recruiting drivers. Not that many trailers carrying ads on this trip; a noticeable change from previous trips! CFI (Contract Freighters Inc.) seems to be one of the exceptions, and JB Hunt also appears to be still in need of drivers. Covenant Transport, on the other hand, seems to be noticeable for their absence on I-40 so far! In past trips, Covenant seemed to have lots of rigs on the road, but I haven't seen very many of their rigs today. I wonder what's up?

Tomorrow should be much more of an adventure in driving. A storm dropped some snow on much of Arizona and New Mexico today, and another front is coming through tonight. It doesn't sound like it's going to be very severe, but I'll be glued to the morning news tomorrow to get the scoop on road conditions!

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Itinerary

Well, folks, I hope tonight's crisis is not a harbinger of things to come!

It's Monday night as I write the opening to this Cow Report. I've spent the day finishing off my Christmas cards and then wrapping presents. With those tasks out of the way, I decided to tackle some computer issues that needed to be cleared up; specifically, uploading some recent images from my digital camera to people who needed the snaps. I took the Dimage7 out of my camera bag into my office and was then distracted by a phone call. Turned out to be a wrong number, and after I hung up I realized that there were a few more issues to clear up before I could sit down at the computer.

With those tasks out of the way, I snapped open the camera's cover over the Compact Flash slot and found the slot was empty. I figured I must have pulled out the CF card before that wrong number distracted me. But I couldn't see the card laying on my desk anywhere! OK, maybe I carried it with me to the phone; but no, I couldn't find it there, either. I had a very strong memory of pulling out the CF card and plugging it into something, but the only CF card readers I had at home were empty! I looked in my kitchen and then the bedroom and then I started to panic. Here I was the night before my trip and I'd lost my camera's "film". I spent about 45 minutes and even dumped out several trash cans on the off chance that I accidentally threw out the card, but it was nowhere to be found. I was really angry and frustrated; first, because it meant I needed to stop by CompUSA to pick up a new card. More importantly, there were some important photos that were now lost. What a way to start the trip!

Finally, I decided to give up and start working on this page. Just as I started, I realized that I'd taken some photos at the office today, and I'd pulled the card out of the camera in order to show the pictures on my computer. Perhaps I'd forgotten the card in the CF reader at work?

I drove over to the office (a big advantage to living close to work!) and sure enough, there was the card! I pulled it out of the reader, brought it back home and got my photos uploaded and distributed. But damn, old-age and senility sure is a bummer!

Here's what the trip looks like in map format:

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