The restaurant experience was not indicative of the entire trip. It got much better after this!
I didn’t include the gross guy sleeping at the table next to us, or the stale, greasy smell in the
restaurant, or the 4 disgustingly dirty men at another table or the really bad smell in the
bathroom or the hair in my wife’s mashed potatoes. My patty melt was good though.
I had to drive my father’s belongings back to California from Oklahoma in the fall of 2007. I kept my camera next to me in the rented moving truck and took a lot of photos out the window as I went. The Texas panhandle is one of my favorite areas precisely because there is so little to see there. What that actually means is that the interesting things you do see are spread out, they are alone, by themselves, easy to spot and appreciate.
Sometimes in dense environments, just as in a dense piece of art, it is hard to discern what is there. That is ok in a museum where you have time to look, but on a road trip it is nice to see something coming 2 miles away!
I stopped at a convenience store outside Amarillo and the clerk’s eyes were blindingly bright and blue with the west Texas sun shining in the window. I asked her if I could take some photos of her eyes and, though she was chided by her fellow clerk, she said yes and was a wonderful, albeit fleeting, model.
The urinal was so low that I almost peed over it. Just had to take a photo. It was not in my top ten nice convenience store restrooms. I was on a solo road trip to California to take my father’s furnishings back to San Diego where he was moving after two years of living in Oklahoma.