Road Warrior's Daybreak

ABILENE, TEXAS. TUESDAY 3/12/13:     

   “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”  

           —Mark Twain (1835-1910), writer and world traveler, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

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   The Master said that.  And, as usual, he was right.  Broadening?  My rear 

end is testament to that, too.  9 hours today from Little Rock, AK  to Abilene, Texas.  Pretty good, since I had to go through Dallas and Ft. Worth.  But it's great.  I used to hear LBJ talk about the Texas Hill Country..and here I am, out where "the lonesome cattle feed on the lowly Jimson weed"..and I'm beginning to see mesas..a sure sign of getting where I aim to be.

Mesas

  The first time Mary Alice and I ventured into Cowboy Country together, I told her to tell me when she saw her first, for-real puncher.  Miles went by..she kept looking, but she never had a sighting.  I finally confessed it was a trick assignment: cowboys drive pickups and wear ball caps, mostly.  The big hat is for social occasions, like going into town, and the horse is reserved for really hard country, not pasture near the Interstate.  

  My cousin, Jim Wiley, said once that he knew I always wanted to be a cowboy.  I denied it because, I said, "I never wanted to work that hard."

  And that's the truth.

   Well, I'll be rolling down I 20 in the morning toward I 10 and El Paso.  Hope to be in Las Cruces, NM tomorrow afternoon.  

   Tucson awaits.

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  Thanks to Professor Ted Pease for the quote, which I borrowed from his daily Word.

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