Las Cruces NM to Jackson, Tennessee Nov 1- 3

    November 1
We left Las Cruces rather early as we had a 500 mile day, which is a bit longer than we generally like to go. Jan packed us a goody bag so that we did not have to stop often.
  It was a day of rather boring landscape. We passed by a fair number of smelly cow pens where cows are fattened up before being slaughtered. We drove through rather heavy traffic through El Paso and felt the presence of "the wall" but did not actually see it. (The sun was pretty glaring, though).
   The land flattened out and we went from Route 10 to Route 20. We drove through a dismal bleak landscape of oil drilling wells. It was awful to see new oil wells as if they have to add to global warming quicker than usual. Lots of scrap metal along the way from rusty old equipment. Ugh. We stayed in Abilene and stayed at a rather dumpy La Quinta and heated tomato soup in the room.
  November 2
 We had a shorter drive today - about 3 hours to Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas where we stopped by Ken Orr's house. We have never visited him before. Unfortunately, his wife, Diane, was at work. We sat in their lush garden and talked and then went to the String Bean, a favorite restaurant of Ken's, and had lunch.

  When we stopped for gas before getting to Ken's house, the screen on the Clarity went dark and we could not see any of the information, change the climate or even use the radio or listen to the audio book we started yesterday. We were rather alarmed.
  On our way out of Dallas, we saw a Honda dealer and they took us right in. Two very nice young men fixed it in a few minutes. They said that the audio button is also a power button and connected to theft-detection. Somehow, it got disabled and they showed us how to fix it. There was no charge and we were on our way quickly. Whew - we were getting quite stressed about it and thought we'd have to schedule a maintenance trip to a dealer along the way.
  We only drove about 80 more miles and stayed at another La Quinta, this time a much nicer one - in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The scenery changed quite dramatically as we approached Dallas - hillier, greener, prettier.

November 3
    We had a long, but uneventful driving day from Sulphur Springs to Jackson, Tennessee. We stayed in a Baymont Motel which was mediocre and got grocery store food. We didn't stop much at all, but did pass a memorial site for the Fort Pillow massacre of black troops during the Civil War. It seemed good for it to be recognized, but then we passed a state park named after KKK leader and man responsible for the massacre-Nathan Bedford Forrest which seems awful to us. His name should not be remembered for anything but horror.