Amarillo by morning...

More literally that we'd expected! Last Saturday afternoon, Russell asked if Maggie and I would like to try to make a trip to Amarillo with he and Mr. Ricky. After some quick internet searches, we booked a flight leaving at 6:15 Sunday (the very next day)! I know y'all know I wear my go britches at all times, but I must say I've never done anything like this at the spur of the moment, but I'm so glad I did. Well, we were expecting to get to Amarillo,TX by about 10:55 that night, but that was if we had actually caught the plane that left us behind in Houston! So, it was Amarillo by "mid-day"! We spent Sunday night in Houston at a hotel with NO luggage, no nothing, just my purse/ diaper bag and a kind departing gift the airport left us with... toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, deo (for your B.O.), etc. Anyway, our flight left Houston at 11:00 and we were in Amarillo by around 12:45. If you're wondering why in the world we went all the way out there, well here's a little taste of what we did...

Maggie Ruth, Russell and me on the airplane. She was an absolute trooper! The altitude didn't bother her and she was soooo good for all of the flights (and the entire trip for that matter)!

This was one of our stops...Hereford, TX. Did you know there was such a place. If you think you've seen farmland, grain bins, irrigation systems, cattle, etc. you just need to mosey on out to the panhandle of TX!!! Russell and I live in a metropolis compared to the rural lands of Texas! This is one of MANY mass storage grain bins we saw along our journey! To put into perspective how huge it really is... the little black square on the bottom left, below the H is the door!!! These things made our grain bins here at home look like a little coffee can!

Wrangler Feedyard Entrance... I just thought it was really "western" looking!

This is in the town of Tulia, TX.

One of our next stops was a feedlot there in Hereford. We have feeder cattle in Wrangler and Southwest Feedlots, of which hold between 40-50 thousand head of cattle! We all enjoyed getting to see how these feedlots operate and how well our cattle are doing in them. Across the road from one of the feedlots where our cattle are is a much larger feedlot called Bar G. It only houses 100 thousand head of cattle! That is cattle as far as you can see in all directions. I stopped and took a picture of it from the road, but it doesn't do it justice for seeing it in real life!

This is the Bar G feedlot. All of the the specks in the distance are cows! The large buildings in the background is the mill where they make the feed for the cattle. Have you ever seen so many cows in all your life?

We (or maybe just it was just me) were also so amazed at how flat the land is out there... if you see a power line, you can't tell where it ends! Its like it just goes on forever.

For those of you who know anything about farming, irrigation systems are not a common thing here in the southeast, but in Texas they're everywhere! This is an irrigation system that was 18 towers long (that's about a half mile in length) which means it can water about a mile of land! That is just amazing to me! When we were flying out of Amarillo I tried to get a few pictures of the land from the airplane. It was a little foggy so they're not really clear but you can atleast see the circular patterns of green where the crops are under the irrigation systems.
The picture is really blurry/foggy, but maybe you can see the half circles. These were (half)crop circles. While riding the panhandle of Texas on Tuesday, we spotted these windmills in the distance. After driving for quite some time, we finally got as close to them as we could. The picture below got a little too close up but you can really see the windmills in the background.

I hope I didn't bore you all with too much detail, but we had a blast and there is a ton more I could go on and on about. Except that its Monday and my house is screaming, "CLEAN ME!!!"