Most of today’s photos were through a bug-marred windshield or a reflection-blotched side window. We walked up to this overlook with a good view of the Arkansas River—which must have been great when the trees were younger, but now they hold more carbon.
We got away from the interstate and went to a tamale place. The menu was on a sign, but didn’t include tamales. Uh oh. But we asked, and indeed got two plates of pork/red sauce tamales. Apparently the local preference is for the homemade hot sauce on top, so we had that, too. The other four salsas were offered in a salsa bar. The salsas were stupendous. The owner is from Michoacán—so the food is not TexMex as it is most places—we were told.
We kept grinding westward. Hot outside; strong AC inside. Look at this: 104° at 4:03pm in western Oklahoma. Yikes. That was the high. There’s a weather system passing through…um, tomorrow?…and temps will drop. This might have been a record-high. It was also super-windy. The big commercial flags were totally horizontal; we heard gusts were expected to be up to 50mph.
Not surprisingly, after we left the trees behind, we saw lots of wind plants…whole forests or plantations of them. We agreed that we were seeing more than a couple of years back.
We did encounter this one blade traveling down the highway. We wondered if it was defective. Perhaps a half-hour later, we saw two other blades on trucks that had pulled off the interstate. We figured that somehow the two parties and three blades had gotten separated. [We make up stories all the time to fit what we notice as we go down the road.]
Seems like the windmills—the old-fashioned kind like this—are fewer and fewer. Stands to reason. And they are difficult to photo at highway speeds!
And oh my was the sky pretty as we traversed the final miles of the day. The camera makes it darker and more contrasty than it was. Still: nice god-rays, looking even better against the empty, distant skyline.