Abilene

Leaving Colorado in the snow

This is the story of our trip to/from Colorado along the Southeast Coast from Corpus Christi to Tampa, Orlando, then St. Augustine to Charleston. If you prefer the 20 minutes annotated video highlights it is available on youtube.

The last 2 days have primarily been traveling days. We started out at 38 degrees and snow from our home. I was worried about Raton pass as we headed south on I-25, but it was fine. When we started to head east on US 64 from Raton, the highway was closed due to weather conditions. Of course, I didn't have a New Mexico map, since we only had about 50 miles to travel in the state. We headed south on I-25 and finally figured out that we could head east on US 56-412 to rejoin our route. That was confirmed when we saw all these other cars turning at the same spot. We made it to Palo Duro State Park outside Canyon, TX about 7:30 PM. This is a beautiful canyon in the midst of the plains of the Texas panhandle. The campground is great and includes water and electricity on paved sites with trees for shade. The night was cool in the 30’s, so we were glad to have our furnace. We woke to turkeys gobbling just across the road from our trailers. 

Turkeys in our campground

We had planned to hike around the park today, but the trails were closed because of the recent rain and snow, so we tried the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum (one of our favorites from another trip). Unfortunately, it’s closed on Mondays. So we headed to Abilene Texas for the night arriving about 3:00 PM. Along the way, we passed huge wind farms. As I recall, Texas is second in the number of wind farms in the state, next to Iowa. The Abilene RV park is nice enough, but there is a lot of truck noise from the interstate. Talk about temperature extremes: we went from the mid-30’s this morning, to the mid-80’s here.