On the road after breakfast, around 9:30. Off to see Palo Duro, down the street about 30 miles south to Canyon Tx, then 10 miles east to the Palo Duro Canyon State Park.
Only $4 each for admission and we got a map and a sticker for our windshield. Yay! Then down to the guest center for orientation, then down the road into the canyon. It was a partly cloudy day so the colors weren't all that they could have been on the photographs, but for us the sights were incredibly beautiful. It is the second largest canyon in the US, behind (obviously) the Grand Canyon. But to my knowledge, civilians can't drive their cars from the rim down into the Grand Canyon. Here, a road goes down from the rim through the bottom areas and loops back and you exit where you came in. That way nobody gets lost. There are six points where creeks pass under the road, but the road doesn't bridge over the creekbed. Instead, the road dips significantly down, and the creek passes through a small culvert below it. Seemed strange until we read the information and realized that the creeks become rushing rivers at the time of flash floods following the few torrential rainfalls they get each year. So rather than washing out the bridges, which would surely happen, they just come in with a front wheel loader and move away all the silt that covers the road in the gully. Then back to normal. We saw the loader, a Cat 966 that is a good-sized machine, and we saw the debris piles in front of both sides of each of the gullys. Yes, they get flash floods. Gully number 4 was underwater by about 6 inches as we came through, but we were OK. The Honda doesn't have a lot of clearance, but it had enough. The picture below shows some of it; I realize that it wasn't too smart to stop in the middle of a flash flood channel for a photo op, but we got away with it. I could babble on for paragraphs, but I won't. It was just beautiful.
After that, we went back through the town of Canyon, and then on to Hereford and points west on US60. Bright blue sky, windows-down weather, and flat, flat, flat, flat terrain. A four lane highway for most of the day, very little truck or car traffic as most people take Interstate 40 just to the north of us out of Amarillo to Albuquerque. The good news was that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad ran just south of us by about 50 yards. Huge long container trains ran every 10 minutes from west to east, and the rail traffic must have been about as active east to west as we would get held up in a little town (US60 passes through them, not around them like I40) we would find a new train beside us when we exited the stop lights and speed zones. We took a thousand pictures, including a couple of movies. One was where we raced a train to a crossing. Yes, we did, and we must have won because I am typing this now. Oh, I should mention that the train passed over the highway, it was not a level crossing. But it is a great video since you don't see the overpass till the last minute, and the intersection angle is about 45 degrees. Nice.
Getting dopey and dozy by the time we got to Vaughn, New Mexico. Jan took two dozen pictures of the sunset, so I could tell that she was in the bag. And I was tired, the animals come onto the road in the twilight, and besides we couldn't see the sights anyway which is the point of the trip. So we stopped in Vaughn at the Bel Air Motel. Deluxe, modern, very trendy, etc - in 1950. Today it is seedy and run down, but it is home for the night and the best we could get. The track crew from the BNSF had the better hotel completely booked. But no internet here, so I'll write this tonight and send it tomorrow.
