We hoped to make it to Denver on Saturday, but the RV repairs stalled our progress. Our old friends, Nikki and Eric Sartin, whom we hadn’t seen since they moved from Lubbock a few years ago, invited us to eat supper and watch the football game at their house in Fort Collins. They fed us a delicious meal, and UGA won the game. The kids played until they were exhausted, and the grown-ups enjoyed a mini-tour of Fort Collins microbreweries. What a happy reunion! Eric’s parents hosted us for the night, and Jackie, Eric’s mom, fixed a huge breakfast the next morning. It did not take the little girls long to realize they’d landed in Grandma-Central. They soaked up all the benefits.

In Denver, we caught up with Misty and Nathan Holman, friends who just moved from Lubbock this past Spring. (For most of my life, I’ve been moving every few years, so it is strange to be the one more permanently fixed in Lubbock, while others go on.) The kids played until they’d burned up all their breakfast, and then we ate again!

In the afternoon, we shared a hike and a meal with another friend we’d met in Lubbock, Stacy Adair. She hosted us overnight at her house.

The end of our trip had become more about people than places, and we started longing for all the folks back home we hadn’t seen in three weeks. From the heights of Colorado Springs, we thought we could almost see Lubbock.

I met my first Texans when I was a teenager at summer camp. They were loud, relaxed, friendly, and unfailingly enthusiastic about their home state. It was a little infectious. Later, when I started dating Brandon, my daddy warned me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be carried off to Texas a la Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the Sabine women. He wasn’t far off the mark, he just failed to foresee that he would be borne away, as well! All of my immediate family are happy residents now.

Lubbock has not been an easy adjustment for me in some ways. After years of longing for a permanent home, it feels like a bit of a mean joke to find my rest in America’s scrublands, the last region of the country to be settled. I sometimes envision Lubbock as the great suburban parking lot of the southern plains. For someone accustomed to the eastern landscape, living in West Texas is akin to habitation on Mars. It’s a dusty, dry, seemingly featureless terrain. That’s when I need my painter friend, Laura Lewis. She knows how to capture the Panhandle on canvas in a way that trains my eyeballs to a new kind of beauty:

With such a roomy sky to showcase it, a full moon grabs me in its thrall every twenty-eight days. I never paid much attention to the moon back east. In fact, there is almost always something jaw-dropping going on in the theater that is our sky. (This morning it was an oddly shaped, brilliantly colored prism, poking out of otherwise black clouds.) I rarely see the songbirds or brightly dressed cardinals and jays of Georgia; our birds match the landscape, but they are pretty impressive carnivores. And under all that pavement lies a fascinating history by turns tragic and triumphant, reprehensible and inspiring. Lubbock is also a loyal and loving community where we enjoy all kinds of freedom and stability at work, in church, and in school. I’ve joked that we are running away from home this year. Surely, I didn’t mean it?

We miss the very routines we were wishing to escape. Our circadian rhythms are off. We are “gunning the throttle for the Llano Estacado.”

Last stop at the Raton-Clayton volcanic field in eastern New Mexico

Inside the Capulin crater, a nice example of an extinct North American volcano

(If you’ve never heard it, tune-in to a great podcast on BBC Witness Archive 2012 of a geologist describing what it was like flying over Mt. St. Helens as it erupted.)

The battle against shoe funk never ends.