From Texas Wind Farms to the Bayou

This entry is for Wednesday, 18 May 2011:

Wow! Texas is really big when you ride across it east to west! It took us two days to finally reach the Louisiana border.

Anyway, today's ride was about 440 miles of relatively straight and flat highway riding that included some interstate. Leaving Snyder in the morning we passed two wind farms that were utilizing the considerable wind that we were encountering in our face as we road along Rt. 180. The first farm had about 100 turbines and the second one more like about 50. The photo shows how the wind farms have been integrated with the farming that was going on all around the farms. As we progressed further east, the landscape generally got greener with more hills and the vegetation became more dense and with increasing heights...becoming trees as we approached Fort Worth, TX and beyond as shown in the photos. In the early part of the trip, I had a Road Runner scoot across the road right in front of me...that was a first for me. It was way too fast for me to get a photo of it. We went through many small Texas towns along Routes 180 and 80. It gave us a chance to see how and where the real people of Texas live and we occasionally got to see some interesting public building architecture (see photo).

We took a slight detour from our planned route to have lunch with Gerry's daughter and two grandchildren near the TCU campus in Fort Worth. Then we got back on route and schedule by doing two sections on I-20 that runs more or less parallel to 180 and then Rt. 80.

We decided to push the ride beyond Texas into Louisiana so that we could spend the night in Shreveport, a.k.a bayou country. We stayed in downtown Shreveport and for dinner ate local cuisine at Ralph and Kacoo's based on hotel staff recommendation. I had the Crawfish Festival meal which provided a sampling of various crawfish dishes. As they say...when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Good crawfish...I like!

Tomorrow we are headed to Natchez, MS which is at the start of the Natchez Trace. The Natchez Trace is the historic route we plan to ride on Friday and Saturday. There is much history that is associated with the Natchez Trace and we plan to make some stops and learn a little about it on this trip.