En route Houston

It's the fourth day of the trip and I have decided to take a day's break at my friend's (N V Pavan) place in Houston Texas. We go back to the IIT days where he was the volley captain, sport secretary, and subsequently President of India gold medalist and all my academic achievements during college were due to the fact that he did not consider them worth fighting for. And for all his brilliance, he has been a disgustingly humble fellow! I have covered about 1600 miles till now and my phone has a nifty little feature which tracks and records the trip in real time,

Tracker

So how has it been? Tiring as expected. And mesmerizing as expected. Anyone who has done any sort of road trip in America knows how magnificent the American landscape is. Its sheer size and almost profligate geography is humbling and because of the fact that the country extends into such a wide spectrum of climate and space, its landscape has a stunning variety that would be hard to find in a smaller country. In east California, the morose, unforgiving desert extends to the point where it is clipped by the sky and every now and then a confused, spatially anachronistic hill rises and seems to question its own existence. In New Mexico, the scale of this insanity is extended so there are places where a straight road starts from a mountain and ends into another 20 miles away - like a cursing, reluctant interpreter between two persons who not only do not speak a common language but don't even like each other very much. At such places, you get the feeling that the American landscape has molded itself to be a better representative of the simple, direct, and strictly utilitarian nature of the American West. Her geography offers no frills in the same way that her work ethics are efficient and honest.

But as soon as I started to gloat over this ingenious connection, the geography gave way to a stunner of a road. Between Las Cruces New Mexico and Roswell lies a winding ribbon that was more beautiful and exciting than any other that I have driven on. Beautiful green mountains with proud upright pine trees, and svelte silky lakes with hints of snow on their banks. The sky, a sprightly shade of blue with flourishes of snowy clouds for good measure. And in this perfection of nature's effort, man has carved his own little squiggly lines - his tarmacic creations like perfect curves of graphite on a flowery, scented paper.

The I-10 in Texas passes through a surprisingly beautiful landscape. I was expecting more like hundreds of miles of unending, depressing desert but was pleasantly  surprised to find vast arenas of green table-top mesas. And as far as the eye could see, they were studded with windmills in a periodic formation of almost devilish contraption. Imagine driving on this fast beautiful road with these giants towering on all sides, their visage that of a grumpy old man, and their rotating mechanical hair standing up in a fit of rage. The road for a long part consists of two lanes in either directions - one lane is white in color and one black - and how stunning this little visual trick is!