Jan 27--Through Western Texas

As you all know, Texas is a big state!  We traveled from Odessa to Abilene, TX today, a much shorter jaunt than yesterday.  The most interesting things that we saw were pretty much all concerned with the oil patch.  By the time we got to Pecos, we started seeing oil wells and pumpers, and they were thick almost all the way to Abilene.  My thought was that it was a good use of the land, since it didn't seem to be worth anything for farming.  We saw almost no cattle, which was surprising, as in some places the grass under the scrubby bushes looked pretty good.

Oil Well Drilling Rigs

Look at all the pumpers!  There were miles of similar views.

A large oil refinery along the road.

 One thing of interest was the "mining" of sand for fracking.  There were many places like this one where they were digging up the sand and trucking it to a terminal where it was loaded onto rail cars.

These look like grain cars, but they are actually hauling fracking sand.

There were also many, many semi trucks hauling big square boxes, apparently of sand.  One company's trucks hauled the boxes and they said "Sand Box" on the side of the box.  I didn't know sand could be such a big business!

When we were getting nearer to Abilene, the landscape changed to more farmland, some under irrigation.  We had seen cotton fields before, but it was interesting to see cotton in big round bales instead of the huge rectangular bales we had seen earlier.

Ted says the newer cotton pickers have a round baler attached, so it can all be done more efficiently.

And last but not least, we stopped at a state of the art rest stop.  It was a huge building, made of brick, and there was a full-time attendant.  We asked her about the tornado shelters (this rest stop had three), and she showed us a square room that would probably hold 10 adults standing up.  It didn't look too impressive, but I imagine if a tornado was coming, it would look pretty good.

I asked the attendant if they had many tornadoes, and she said "none".  She said they often started in the clouds in the area, but none had ever touched down.  She wasn't sure why they needed shelters at the rest stop either!