We packed up and got some donuts for the road. A good friend of mine Heather, advised me to check out the Donut Stop for some delicious donuts, the students at AC echoed this sentiment. We piled in to the empty store and were greeted with the aroma of warm donut heaven. The man working the store was very nice. We got a lot of extra donuts. For the third time on the trip, someone spoke Spanish to Courageous thinking he would understand.
We took a 30 minute detour south to see Palo Duro Canyon, also known as Texas’s Little Grand Canyon. It was by no means little, it felt intimidating, and absolutely massive. We stopped for some pictures and drove down into the canyon. It was another reminder of how big this world was, and how privileged we were that poetry was taking us here. Pictures can’t do this place justice….but they can try.
The grey Toyota headed east in the Texas sun through small town after small town. We were pulled over in Memphis, TX, and we weren’t sure exactly why. The officer stated that he “saw” us doing 91 in a 75. No radar proof, he just saw it. As he ran our information, I did some research and found that towns in this area made the majority of their money from giving people tickets. We were victims of a good old fashioned small town shakedown. We pondered ways to get out of the ticket, but the signs seemed to point to cold fact that we were out $180 bucks. There goes the money we made from merchandise sales!
A whole lot of nothing lay between Amarillo and Dallas. Courageous got enough cell phone data to stream Kobe Bryant’s last basketball game on SlingTV. The bright lights of Dallas were a welcoming site. As someone who grew up in the country, I never thought I would feel so much safer between the skyscrapers of a big city. We pulled into Hotel Indigo in downtown Dallas, ready to crash so we could head to Tyler early the next morning. We got to our room, and realized that the AC was out. It was past midnight, instead of complaining..we dealt with it.