Our Trip Across America-Part 5

A Slice of Life

Bill Lites

Now we headed West on I-20 for our next stop in Dallas, Texas to show the kids where I was born and grew up as well as where I was taken to my first church service (the nursery) at the age of two weeks old.

We made our way through the big “D” to Gilley’s Palladium with it’s famous mechanical bull “El Toro” of movie fame.

Then it was on over for a quick visit to the historic Fort Worth Stockyards where we got a good idea of what a huge operation that had been.

We also got to meet some modern cowboys and some of the bulls they had tamed.

We continued West on I-20 thru Abilene, Midland and Odessa, then at Pecos we headed North on US-285 to Carlsbad, New Mexico.  It was on this stretch of US-285 that we had our first camper tire blowout.  I thought “oh-no, what a place to have to change a tire!”   Did I mention it was the middle of the day, in the middle of July, in the middle of the desert?  Well, anyway, I had checked all three camper tires before leaving Florida and they looked good with lots of tread.  But, it never dawned on me that they could have been the original tires that came with the camper when it was new.  And that was how many years ago?  I had no idea.  I guess the weather had gotten to them, even though they didn’t have many miles on them.  Well, I don’t know what the actual temperature was, but it was hot.  Funny thing though, as I worked away changing that tire, I never seemed to break a sweat.  There was a light breeze and I guess with less that 10% humidity it all evaporated before I even noticed I was sweating.  What a surprise!  I would have been dripping wet if this had been at home in Florida.

We took the tour of Carlsbad Caverns and were awestruck by the beauty and wonders of those huge caverns that extended deep underground.  In fact, we were told that Carlsbad Caverns are the deepest caverns in the U.S. at 1594 feet.  They even had mallets hooked up electrically to an organ and played beautiful music by devices striking the stalactites and stalagmites with the mallets.  What a wonderful audio/visual sensation that was.  We stayed around until dusk that evening to watch the nightly flight of the bats from the caverns on their way to look for food.  There were so many that they blotted out the sky at one point as they emerged from the caverns.

–To Be Continued–