Leaving Santa Fe on secondary roads, we passed large ranches, white fields of cotton ready for harvest, cotton gins with huge bales of cotton waiting to be processed and some decaying towns where the economy used to thrive. There were several boarded up towns with just a few businesses left. One town, Tatum, has three metal artists and all the ranch and street signs were beautiful laser cut designs. We passed a huge sheep ranch and a thoroughbred race horse farm as well as several goat farms. Texas is the country's largest producer of mutton, lamb, wool an mohair (goats). We spent the night in Big Spring, a west TX city of 25000 with an 80 year old refinery, hundreds of wind generators and scores of oil field support companies. Water is scarce and the oil field need to use water, so they have excavated large pits, lined them with plastic and then filled with water. The drive to SPI was the usual--except more new wind generators and almost 100 degrees! So here we are ready for the wind.
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