Traveling Through Texas

Today, Sunday (Palm Sunday), we traveled 356 miles eastward in Texas from Lamesa to Caddo Mills just east of Dallas. We traveled on state route 180 from Lamesa to just west of Fort Worth,then after a short stint on I-20 continued to Caddo Mills on I-30. The 180 route parallels I-20 but has less traffic and more scenery. Towns along the route are 30 miles or more apart and small with few, if any, traffic lights. Several of the towns we passed through were county seats and had stately old county government buildings.

Not long after starting out we began seeing greener vegetation. We were in the hill country of Texas with mesquite trees in abundance and some areas had charred remains of forest fires. Flowers along the roadsides were just beautiful. The Texas Blue Bonnets, which I believe are the Texas state flower, were in bloom and large areas appeared as blue carpeting.

There were other flowers in purple and orange along the way. As we got further east we saw streams and rivers with water flowing not the dried beds that are in Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas. Herds of cattle were in the pastures and often cows would be standing in the small ponds or streams. One pasture had a herd of little horses. We stopped in Mineral Wells and had lunch at a Chili's before entering the metropoltan area of Fort Worth/Dallas. We wanted to be east of Dallas tonight to avoid Monday morning traffic through that 70 plus miles of Fort Worth/Dallas tomorrow. Todays traffic through that area was moderately heavy but moved well. On the eastern end we did get slowed up due to an accident. We are camped tonight at a KOA- Dallas NE/Caddo Mills KOA- quiet campground and for KOA not too costly- $33.74.