Road Trip in December - Texas

The road trip across Texas was a long one - from Texarkana to El Paso with a side trip toward Oklahoma City from Dallas. It was easy to see the vegetation trend across the state from forest to mixed forest/grasslands to grass lands then sand dunes/desert to rocky desert. There are rivers to cross too: the Red, the Trinity, the Brazos, the Rio Grande. The terrain goes from hilly to flat to a climb up onto the Edwards Plateau to flat again then the mountains.

I wrote about the rest stop mosaics in west Texas in an earlier blog. The rest stops in Texas were all clean and well maintained; the ones in west Texas were the same temperature as outside so were very cold when I passed through. There was at least one where the construction of a new facility was already started, presumably one that will be heated and cooled. 

The pictures below are from the welcome station between Texas and Oklahoma on the Red River (two on left), the wind farms that seem to be more numerous every time I come through west Texas (lower right) and then the mountain ranges that appeared on the horizon to break the monotony of the sand dune part of the state.