Midland TX to Shreveport LA (Dec. 3-4)
We left Midland on a cloudy day, which made driving a bit easier. It is oil country and scrubland all the way to Big Spring, although there are some red hills from time to time.
After Big Spring there is a lot more water. The oil rigs give way to cotton fields and wind farms (usually sharing the fields) along with some forage crops. Everything is greener, although there is still plenty of prickly pear – in fact, in some areas the prickly pears are so thick they look like the roadside shrubbery that one would find in the NE. Big Spring also has a big petroleum refinery – the first we have seen.
Between Midland and Big Spring, we noticed many, many RV parks. Most of these do not seem to cater to travelers, being essentially 1 or 2 acre parking lots. Our guess is that many oil workers live in RVs, rather than mobile homes as they might in the NE.
As we move east, there is more water, less desert and more trees. The landscape begins to look more familiar, but the prickly pears still replace the underbrush in a lot of places.
We stopped just west of Fort Worth so that we could roll through the Fort Worth / Dallas area on Sunday morning when traffic should be relatively light.. Our stop, the Cowtown RV Park, was fine for an overnight, and had a lot of trees.
We took a slightly shorter driving day on Sunday. However, quite a lot of our driving time was spent going through the Fort Worth – Dallas conurbation. Needless to say, the highways in the conurbation are tangles of overpasses and roads. Most the the time, we were on a 4 lane highway, so we were able stick to lanes that are not merging to left or right. As hoped, traffic was relatively light and it was certainly less stressful than driving through some other cities of comparable size.
We decided to stop when we got to Shreveport LA. We are once again in the land of trees and familiar birds like cardinals.