The Statue of Liberty in Texas?

The winds west of Abilene were predicted to be on the strong side, blowing crosswise to the freeway. Just what I most wanted to avoid. But it looked like they were supposed to slowly decrease as the day progressed, and I really wanted to get to Pecos that night. I consulted my new trucker's app on my phone (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trucker-path/id782746890?mt=8 if you're curious) and saw that there would be places I could pull off and park all along the route, so I knew that the worst case would be that I'd stop and read a while the wind grew weaker, and wind up not getting as far as Pecos.

My first rest stop of the day was in the town of Big Spring. I planned to stop at the truck stop there, but it looked completely full, so I kept driving into town. I'm not sure if the Statue of Liberty was the one thing I least expected to see there, but it was the thing I actually did see that I least expected to see.



My next stop was in Odessa, Texas. I'd been curious about that town since I'd heard that the fictional town from Friday Night Lights was based on Odessa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Night_Lights_(TV_series) ). I considered taking the route through Odessa and staying overnight there when I moved from California to Indiana, but the Best Western there was really expensive and had a one-week cancellation policy. That was back before I knew that Odessa was in oil country. That explained why the local motels were doing well enough to make them so very unattractive to someone who wasn't 100% sure of their travel schedule. That trip I wound up going through Amarillo instead of Odessa because the prices were better and the cancellation policies were normal. This small city named after the third most populous city in Ukraine has left me curious about it even though driving by on I-10 doesn't make it look too promising.

By the time I got to Odessa, I was clearly in oil country. Lots of big trucks with special equipment on them, occasional flaming smokestacks, and higher prices. Would I find some fresh interesting surprise like the Statue of Liberty? No suck luck. If there is anything I would find interesting about Odessa, I didn't stumble across it. The most interesting thing I noticed on its Wikipedia page is a meteor crater a few miles outside of town. I might like to check that out sometime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_Meteor_Crater

How was the wind during this drive? I could hear it and feel it, but it wasn't steering my van into the next lane, so I felt pretty relaxed for the whole drive. I'm glad I didn't let the weather forecast hold me back. I would make it Pecos when I wanted to.


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