We are safe and sound in Amarillo, Texas. It was a long day of driving, just shy of 660 miles and 11 hours of travel (including stops) in total. We left Williams, Arizona this morning around 7:30am, drove into and through New Mexico and into Texas just after sunset. We both split up the driving almost 50/50 so it was much easier on both of us. There weren’t many stops today as our main goal was to put a significant distance behind us after a few days of sightseeing and more casual driving. We did stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico which was interesting – I’ve always heard of Albuquerque as the butt of “middle of nowhere” jokes but the city was nothing like I expected. It was actually a very large, major and modern center – out in the middle of nowhere lol! Truthfully we’re realizing you need at least 3-4 weeks to do this drive properly, there are so many places we’d like to stop and explore unfortunately however we don’t have the luxury of time to keep stopping everywhere along the way. Perhaps someday!
It was an interesting day to be in the US, as it was election day. Even though we’ve mostly been on the highway, we did manage to see a few interesting aspects of the election both over the past few days as well as today. As we stopped in rural Utah for lunch a few days ago we ran into a full group of McCain/Palin party organizers in a local Subway restaurant. We got more than a few ‘funny looks’ from those folks when they saw our California license plates on the car (California of course by far being Democrats). Today we saw something both cute and inspiring: a group of four school-age boys, no more than 13 years old standing on a street corner near the freeway exit in Albuquerque with a handmade sign reading “HONK for Obama – NOT for McCain!”. They were there by themselves, no parents around, jumping up and down and very excited about the support they were getting from the motorists passing by. Personally I don’t even remember knowing what an election was at that age, let alone publicly supporting one candidate or another. One other nice thing today – Starbucks was giving away free coffee on election day, we didn’t even know it until we stopped in for a caffeine break mid-afternoon.
Our Votes: The Best We Could Do!
We did the best we could to support our choice for President. Obviously as Canadian citizens we couldn’t vote in American Election, but 7-Eleven was running a promotion whereby you could buy coffee in cups specially made for your choice of presidential candidate. Each purchase counted as a ‘vote’ and the results were tracked at www.7-election.com. I’m certain it didn’t help the cause but I’m glad to see that America went that way anyway. 
If you haven’t already noticed, we’re trying to get photos of a “Welcome to” sign for every state line that we cross. We aren’t sure we’ll get every one, we’ve crossed state lines in the past in the US where there were no signs (such as crossing from California to Nevada and back around Lake Tahoe), but we’ll do our best. The Texas sign is above, here are the two others we passed today:
The temperature has really started to change as we travel away from the West Coast. Despite being so far south, it was COLD – just a little above freezing temperatures – when we left Arizona this morning. It probably doesn’t help that we are almost 5000 ft feet up as we travel across this area. This afternoon it did warm up to very comfortable temperatures – and it is warmer this evening in Texas. Thankfully we have still not lost the continual sunshine that we are so used to from California!
Also BTW, we passed through another timezone today; we are now on Central Time – 2 hours ahead of California and 2.5 hours behind Newfoundland.
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