Yesterday, today and tomorrow it's my turn to drive because Henk has to work. His computer got eventually sort of fixed, I think, maybe, he's making his meetings work with both the current laptop and the previous one.

From St. Louis, Ill., Monday morning early, we took route 44 southwest to Oklahoma City. Things progressed so well that we decided on a scenic detour, so we switched to rte 71 South just before we got to Joplin and Oklahoma. This route goes through lovely wooded mountains in western Arkansas. The Ozarks? Not sure... I just can't get enough of the fall colors that we see everywhere. They look especially vibrant when I have my sunglasses on ;) - green-browns, mustard yellow-browns, orange-browns, chestnut-browns, regular browns, but also flashes of reds. These are not our familiar maples, I don't know what they are, other than lovely. While enjoying same I briefly forgot to keep an eye on the fuel gauge - hey,  it's a Prius, we go three quarters of a day on 10 gallons, no wonder I forget! Thanks goodness it beeps with 35 miles worth of gas left. Unfortunately in a particularly thinly populated stretch of road... Henk was starting to get visions of calling AAA, but thanks goodness he found a gas station on his iPhone within reach. It slurped 9.2 gallons and burped.
Back on route 71 the number had changed to 540, and we were on famous rte 40 shortly after. As soon as we drove into Oklahoma we found ourselves in the Cherokee nation. We didn't get a Cherokee tribal nation number plate - did I tell you about the number plates? To prevent boredom on Saturday I started "collecting" state number plates. We're now at 37 states, three canadian provinces, Germany (!?), and later on yesterday we saw two tribal nation plates, the Kickapoo tribe and the Seneca-Cayuga's. They look exactly like the Oklahoma plates except for a different letter-number combination and the tribe name along the top. Missed looking for the Cherokee plates though because we didn't know they existed.
We also drove past the wildlife/bird sanctuary area where we stayed a few days last year in November. I'm almost sure I saw a few black vultures. Almost.

The weather has been lovely yesterday and today, mid-eighties in the afternoons. Not exactly Fall weather... So, in the morning we do need long sleeves and long pants, but in the afternoon, not so much. I ran in and out of a WalMart real quick when we stopped for lunch yesterday for a pair of capris and a t-shirt. Of course back into the long pants in the evening.

We got to Oklahoma City before dinner time, left again before 6:30 Central Time A.M. this morning, and reached Albuquerque today at around 4:30 mountain time. All of this on rte 40, except when we took our Famous U.S. Byway Detour. This was before Amarillo, Texas state route 207 south; a dead straight two-lane road without breakdown lanes on which you're allowed to drive 70 mph. I dared about 60. It goes south through boring ranch land for 10 miles or so and then suddenly a gorgeous canyon opens up before your eyes: Palo Duro Canyon, but much further south than where we camped overnight last year. It's 9 miles wide and 1000 feet deep there. We drove down, across, over the little river, and up the other side to a picnic area with an overlook. It's all pink and red and creamy white layers with deep green junipers and blue and purple haze in the shadows. Beautiful. This byway goes further past a reservoir and through another canyon, but we left that part for another cross-country event. So from the picnic area we turned around and drove back in the opposite direction to admire Palo Duro looking north.

Today's landscape: full of trees for a bit after we left Oklahoma city, then rolling prairie (OK), then flat empty prairie with empty cotton fields and almost empty ranch land with a few cows and horses (TX). The nicest part was once we were a ways into New Mexico. We drove through the mesa country with its various colored rock formations, mesas and buttes dotted with junipers and cut with mini-canyon gullies. Amarillo in Texas is an "interesting" town - a sort of route 28 in Salem, NH on steroids, in the middle of nowhere in the flat empty prairie. Another little town that's much, much nicer is Santa Rosa, further west. It lies between junipers up against a mesa, where there is a cut in it and you drive down (or up) on the curvy road between the rocks. I thought it was a good place to stop for gas. Didn't want to run so nerve-wreckingly low again in this country where the population is spread so thin...

In Albuquerque this afternoon we had time to go for a walk in the old town area before dinner. Lovely adobe buildings with strings of dried peppers hanging outside, a cool adobe church from 1706 that has been in use constantly ever since - can you imagine? - lots of little shops with indian pottery etc. etc. Then we went to Applebees for dinner. Were done barely in time before Opa's evening phone calls started...