{"id":28154,"date":"2018-02-17T01:47:09","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T01:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=28154"},"modified":"2018-02-17T01:47:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-17T01:47:09","slug":"happy-trails-part-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=28154","title":{"rendered":"Happy Trails, Part 75"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The time has arrived for me to start thinking about what I am going to miss about the Texas Panhandle.<\/p>\n

Our retirement journey this week took a big step forward to the next place.<\/p>\n

This place, though, has been good to my wife and me. We’ve called it home for 23 years … plus a couple of months. As we prepare to move on down the road, I am filled with many memories.<\/p>\n

One of them slapped me in the face the first time I ever laid eyes on this region. It occurred in late 1994. I flew from Beaumont to Amarillo to interview for a job at the Amarillo Globe-News, which had a post to fill: editorial page editor of both papers, the Daily News and the Globe-Times.<\/p>\n

I landed at Amarillo International Airport, walked into the terminal and met the man I hoped to succeed. Tom Thompson was about to become press secretary for the newly elected congressman from the Panhandle, Republican Mac Thornberry.<\/p>\n

We walked out to the parking lot and I noticed right away: Man, this place looks so … big! <\/em><\/p>\n

I could not get over how far one can see here. We walked to Thompson’s car and even riding from the airport toward downtown I couldn’t take my eyes off the panorama.<\/p>\n

I don’t recall my precise words to Thompson as we drove into the city, but I think it was something like, “I cannot believe how big and spread out everything looks.”<\/p>\n

If you’ve been the Golden Triangle, or seen the Piney Woods of Deep East Texas, you get what I meant. The pine trees and the dogwoods are lush. The highways that course through the woods, however, do tend leave one with a bit of claustrophobia.<\/p>\n

Not here, man! You see the High Plains of Texas for the first time and you feel, well, sort of liberated.<\/p>\n

Yes, I will miss that feeling here. I will miss the big, beautiful sky that I’ve said before is God’s payback to the region for neglecting to grant this part of the world with purple mountain majesty.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m like to have more to say in the days and weeks ahead about the many friends my wife and I have made here. I’ll offer a word or two about the professional fulfillment I received while working for nearly 18 years at the local newspaper. I might even say something about how I managed to navigate my way through a community with a significantly different world view than the one I carry with me.<\/p>\n

Today, my mind takes me back to that first glimpse of the wide open spaces this region provides. One’s first impression of a place often is the most compelling. So it was when I first cast my gaze on the place we would call “home.”<\/p>\n\n

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The time has arrived for me to start thinking about what I am going to miss about the Texas Panhandle. Our retirement journey this week took a big step forward to the next place. This place, though, has been good to my wife and me. We’ve called it home for 23 years … plus a … Continue reading Happy Trails, Part 75<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[179,7596,1936,5491,3920,4632,4668],"class_list":["post-28154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-agn-media","tag-deep-east-texas","tag-golden-triangle","tag-piney-woods","tag-retirement","tag-texas-gulf-coast","tag-texas-panhandle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28155,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28154\/revisions\/28155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}