I got some orange juice this morning stamped with "BEST BEFORE JAN 2209". It seems like good advice, most things are.

The problem with road tripping during the winter is that it gets dark so early. I'm heading up towards the mountains in New Mexico so I feel like I'm finally *here* "in the west", except the sun went down just as I was crossing the border. As far as I can tell I'm still in the mostly flat part but it's a different kind of flat here. Driving through Missouri and Arkansas at night you can tell it's flat because the farm lights stretch off into the distance. Out here in the desert you lose track of everything outside the highway corridor because it's all just pitch black, especially on a night like this with no moon, until a light appears miles and miles off to the side of the highway and reminds you of where you are and how vast and empty it is. Hopefully I'll come back through here in daylight on the way home.

I spent the afternoon driving across the northern end of the Llano Estacado. 150 years ago when people talked about the "Great American Desert" they weren't talking about the Mojave or Sonora, they were talking about this place. It encompasses over 30,000 square miles, is completely flat, is completely covered in grass, and if it wasn't for modern irrigation it would be completely dry. Coronado named this place when he passed by because he thought the featureless wasteland would be impenetrable. Nowadays thanks to the piped in water it's mostly farms, but it doesn't take much to imagine what it would be like without all the infrastructure. The old Route 66 used to run through here but has since been abandoned in favor of the Interstates. The stretches outside civilization have for the most part has been reclaimed by the plains.

One thing about driving solo is that it affords plenty of time to think about random crap. Passing through Oklahoma City a place called the "Dental Depot" caught my eye. It looked like someone had converted an old train depot into a dental office (and it was definitely a real dentist's office), complete with a steam train out front on a short section of leftover track. A few miles later I passed another one and realized that it's a chain of dental offices all branded as train stations. It occurred to me that if someone is choosing their medical providers based on how accurately they can recreate a train station they might have problems.

Oklahoma City is also home to the "Will Rogers World Airport", which also brought to mind the "George Bush Intercontinental Airport" in Houston. What's wrong with "International Airport"? Here's a hint to the politicians who name these things: You may think it makes your city look cool to have a "world" or "intercontinental" airport when everybody else has a mere "international" airport, but it really says "inferiority complex". Get over it.

Something else that has occurred to me as I've crossed time zones twice in the last 24 hours: way too many things have clocks in them. Between the car, the GPS, the camera, the laptop, my watch, and my altimeter I have 6 different things that require a time change. The GPS is the one that annoys me the most. It uses ultra-precise clocks to figure out where it is anywhere on the planet with 6 feet of accuracy, yet it can't figure out that it just crossed into another time zone. This actually burned me once in the Sierra when I was using it as my primary clock and was wondering why it wasn't dark yet even though it was 8pm in January.

I've still got 400 miles to go before I sleep. I'm somewhere between Tucumcari and Albuquerque. I'm aiming for the vicinity of Flagstaff, AZ tonight, possibly in a tent. We'll see what time it is when I get there.

Tags: Road Trips