April 11, 2010: Fort Worth to Amarillo

In my report for April 10th (Saturday), I forgot to mention the adventures with attempting to swap out my rental car. In my previous cross country trip, Avis wanted me to turn in the car to an Avis office and swap it with another car every 3,000 miles. That would allow them to do an oil change and maintenance. In this case, since I rented for less than two months, I was told I could keep the car and just get oil changes. They would take the cost of oil changes off my bill. However, I was welcome to turn in the car at any corporate-owned Avis office if I chose.

I had a ways to go before an oil change was needed, but I was getting uncomfortable with the idea of heading into the southwest, knowing I'd be on a lot of backroads, with a car that had a northeast license plate. I wanted to call the Dallas-Fort Worth Avis office to see if they'd allow a swap before actually going there. It was impossible to talk to anyone at the office. With every button chosen on the automated system, you'd be sent to their national reservation line or you'd get voice mail. Finally, I went there. The DFW airport is huge and it was a mess driving around the surrounding roads. The GPS could not really help me. At first, I tried to take my car to the rental return place and then saw horrible spikes going in which would have destroyed the tires. The sign said "pull forward" but there was nothing to retract the spikes.

Finally, I found the actual rental office with parking for the office. The staff person was willing to do a swap. But, the car had to be returned on an upper level (back to worrying about the spikes), and a new car would have to be picked up at the lower level. He offered to let me use a small cart to transfer my stuff. When I travel, the car is filled because I take extra clothes, and extra of basically anything else I might need just in case there are problems. Better safe than sorry. But to try and move that with a tiny little cart would mean I'd be transferring stuff all night. So, I decided to skip it. I would just have faith and trust in God in terms of any problems arising from my plate showing I was a long way from home.

Anyway, on to Sunday. After church I did more exploring of Fort Worth. It really is a nice place despite the congestion. One thing I like about Texas in the big cities is that the interstates all have service roads, and a special left turn lane. If you miss your exit you can just go to the next one, stay as close to the left as possible, and go into a left lane that avoids the red lights and gets you right back on the interstate going in the opposite direction. That's quite handy and I used it a few times.

My next stop was Amarillo, which is in the panhandle. I had an almost six hour drive on an interstate style road which ran from Fort Worth almost to Amarillo. It was basically nowheresville. There were occasionally some very small towns (with populations below 1,000) along the way. But for the most part, you'd see cows and pastures along the way. The speed limit on this non-interstate road is 70. It has roads crossing it. There just isn't a lot of traffic, but still, taking a left turn or going straight across a 70 mph road... (I've seen roads like this in the Dakotas and I've seen roads like this at 65 mph in Oklahoma.) At one point, one of the crossroads was named New York Road. That was funny to see, especially since there weren't any other state name crossroads.


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Texas is generally flat in this area. It was cloudy the entire day. After dark, I started noticing the sky lighting up. There were lightning storms (no thunder). I was able to see the lightning directly hit the ground in the fields on either side of the road. (I remember the first time I saw this type of thing in really flat areas. I was in western Nebraska, heading for Wyoming, back in 2007. It got me very nervous.) At this point I just enjoyed the show but did not get nervous. I wouldn't have to worry about downed power lines because when this road was not passing through small towns, there were no power lines along or across the road. It did start to rain, so I slowed down to avoid any accidents. But, the rain was fairly short.

Getting onto I-40, I started to see a bit of Amarillo. The businesses are definitely western-themed. But, it was clear that there would not be the congestion problems of Fort Worth. Amarillo has only about 200,000 people (compared to Fort Worth's 700,000+) and once you leave the city, it's rural with very small cities (as opposed to suburbs surrounding Fort Worth).

The wind was really fierce as I was bringing things into the hotel. Apparently, this is average for Amarillo.