The car is big.  Not SUV big.  But bigger than it drives.  And drive it does.  It’s almost 900 miles from Kansas City to Santa Fe,  Yesterday, day 11, we covered just under half of that, like it was nothing.

Alabama and Mississippi are flat-ish.  Tennessee too.  Western Missouri, Eastern Kansas and Eastern Oklahoma are very green (in June anyway) with rolling hills.  Not what we expected, but nice driving.  Inside the car, seeing all that green, it’s hard to remember the outside temperature is around 100.  I guess things will turn brown soon enough.

We picked Weatherford, OK as the more-or-less halfway point.  We left late and got there earlier than we expected.  The town is right around the line when the land flattens out.

It turned out not to be the best choice.  The town is small, which is fine.  But that means the choice of hotels is limited.  Ours, the Fairfield Inn had bugs.  Not so fair after all.

Today things are much better.  We went from the worst hotel of the trip to the best.  And the drive was interesting.  We covered the rest of Oklahoma, the top part of Texas and a good bit of New Mexico.  It rained hard around the Texas / New Mexico border, which slowed us down.  The geography in Western Oklahoma is more like we expected; flatter and browner than the eastern side of the state.  That continued into Texas.  Once we got close to New Mexico, the terrain got interesting again.

The last 60 or so miles of the trip was on a state highway.  It was nice to get off the Interstate and into more interesting land.

We’ll hang out here in Santa Fe for a few days and then head north.  And west.

States so far:  GA, AL, MS, LA, TN, AR, MO, KS, OK, TX, NM