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Day 35: Mon Aug 25, 1997

 Left Alamogordo at 9:50 am MDT. Not in time to visit Capulin Volcano in northern New Mexico. I've been wanting to see it for years, maybe someday. We headed north on Rt 54 and picked up I-40 east through the Texas Panhandle. The weather was a bit too sunny, made it hard to see the computer screen. We are at this moment between Amarillo, Texas and the Oklahoma border. I'm caught up with the web pages and since I can't write the future yet, guess I'll work on the pictures I scanned in (the battery is getting low).

As we traveled on I-40 around Tucumcari, NM, an escarpment was seen to the south. It was the northern edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. The escarpment is about 450 feet high in this area and the plains above are very flat. So flat and featureless that one theory for the origin of the name is that stakes were used to mark paths across the plains. The escarpment got lower and closer to the road and became more irregular, and we finally crossed it as it merged into the lower level we were on.

I didn't work on the pictures, I proofread the pages I had typed in by having the reading program read the pages to Sharleen while we drove. That really helps find typos. Most typos are dropped letters, my keyboard has that problem, it wants more pressure than I'm used to. We got a room in Elk City, OK.

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