I am going to miss many aspects about living in West Texas.
My friends; the big sky and the fabulous sunrises and sunsets; Palo Duro Canyon; the distinctly different seasons of the year.
I won’t miss one aspect of life on the High Plains: the distance one must travel to get anywhere.
Our 23 years on the High Plains has acclimated my wife and me to this reality. It is that you don’t measure travel in miles; you measure it in the time it takes you to get somewhere. If it’s only an hour’s drive, no sweat. Even a two-hour drive is tolerable. Three hours? Eh, it’s still doable.
It took me a while to get used to that element of West Texas life. But I did. It’s no longer a big deal for either of us — and I’m presuming this of my wife — to “commute” 30 or 40 miles in a morning. Hey, it’s still less than an hour behind the wheel!
We moved to the High Plains from the Golden Triangle, where any destination of note was much closer to home. Ninety minutes to Houston; four hours to New Orleans; five hours to Dallas-Fort Worth; 30 minutes to the beach.
Soon (I hope) we’ll be relocating to points southeast of the High Plains. We’ll be settling somewhere in the Metroplex. Our precise destination is yet to be determined.
I’m not yet sure how long it will take me to re-acclimate to travel in a region where destinations aren’t spread so far apart. I suspect it won’t take long. I figure it’s always easier to fall back on what we once knew than to venture into a strange — and largely unknown — way of life.
If only we could take our friends, the canyon and that gorgeous sky with us.
Well, John we hope you like the Metroplex. We moved to the Mansfield area 5 years ago. We like it because it is near one of our sons and an easy drive or flight to see our other two sons. What we don’t like is going into Dallas, which is like driving on a racetrack. I grew up in Amarillo and went to college at Texas Tech. Driving was never a hassle in those two towns, but it can be a hassle here.
We’ve got our eyes on a number of communities NE of Dallas. We don’t plan to venture often into Big D. But I, too, like being close to an international air travel hub that’ll take us anywhere in the world. The adventure awaits.