138. Amarillo, Potter County

I barely beat the sun here but the gathering clouds really made that almost a moot point. With what little sunlight there was, I did the best I could and give kudos to modern technology for making the photos as good as they are. That said, Amarillo was a little disappointing, not because the town is bad in and of itself, but because I didn’t get the cache I really wanted. When you’re here, there’s really only one truly acceptable cache as far as I’m concerned. Problem was the light wouldn’t last long enough for me to get out there and, looking at those clouds, I wasn’t sure I’d make it there before it started to storm. So I opted for a nearby virtual and I’m glad I did.

See this big black marble? It’s a 1.5 ton block of granite. What you might not be able to see is that underneath is a jet of constantly running recycled water and, pushing at 10 PSI, that is enough to keep the granite globe suspended so that it’s able to be moved by hand with little effort at all. Quite cool! So, as per the mandate of the virtual, I submitted a photo of myself pushing it.

Photo submitted, I thought about the original plan. I had originally intended to stop for the night here in Amarillo, but decided to head on to the next town and start there in the morning, so I got back on the road. That turned out to be…an interesting choice. Why? Because the heavens opened up. I don’t mean it rained. It had been raining off and on all day. I mean it was a deluge bringing all traffic to an inching pace. It was cars pulling over to the side of the road. It was trucks turning on their blinkers because headlights were not enough to maintain visibility. But, craziest of all, was when the rain broke and I saw the sky. Imagine for a moment that Hieronymus Bosch decided to paint a landscape. And when you looked at it, the blues and greens and reds and yellows and whites and grays all mix together, a tableau that is both mesmerizing and unsettling in equal measure. I watched two dark clouds make their way across the sky. One looked like a goose swimming its way across the the multicolored water. The other looked like some…creature following, trying to wear the skin of a goose. I rarely use the word “lovecraftian” in a non-fictional setting, but that is the word I would use to describe this moment. And I drove on through it. I went on, through the color, through the downpour, through the traffic until I made it to…