About 50 miles east of Little Rock the grass turns green.
We decide not to detour to Hope, AR, birthplace of Bill Clinton and home of Paul Klipsch (maker of fabulous speakers). We went to the Clinton Presidential library in Little Rock last year.
The landscape has flattened out significantly in the western part of Arkansas and into Texas. I-30 comprises both a high-speed interstate and a local access road, so there is a lot to look at. There are a few large ranches with enormous main houses right out of a movie, but there are also trailer parks and rows of cookie-cutter houses.
There are pawn shops and gun shops everywhere you look, sometimes combined into one business.
As we approach Dallas, we pass a couple of high schools with stadiums that are the equal of, or maybe better than, those of many colleges in the northeast.
Downtown Dallas, at least what we can see from the highway, has a lot of interesting modern architecture, using glass, angles and curves, and sometimes colored elements in the buildings. Dallas's "World Trade Center" (convention center) is the exception: it is a dark grey/brown, hulking cube with no architectural features whatsoever to relieve its monolithic appearance.
The highways here are large, with lots of lanes and proper banking on the curves, which makes for fairly pleasant driving. Still, there are signs to remind everyone of the 3258 traffic fatalities in 2012. I had to look up the rate to get some perspective. Texas has 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles. Arizona is at 1.8. Montana is the highest in the nation at 2.0. The lowest rate in the nation? Massachusetts, at 0.6. The old joke is that we never get going fast enough to hurt anyone badly before we crash into each other. Still, all of these rates are half of what they were 20 years ago, thanks to seat belts, air bags, energy-absorbing bumpers, and so on.
The landscape has flattened out significantly in the western part of Arkansas and into Texas. I-30 comprises both a high-speed interstate and a local access road, so there is a lot to look at. There are a few large ranches with enormous main houses right out of a movie, but there are also trailer parks and rows of cookie-cutter houses.
There are pawn shops and gun shops everywhere you look, sometimes combined into one business.
As we approach Dallas, we pass a couple of high schools with stadiums that are the equal of, or maybe better than, those of many colleges in the northeast.
Downtown Dallas, at least what we can see from the highway, has a lot of interesting modern architecture, using glass, angles and curves, and sometimes colored elements in the buildings. Dallas's "World Trade Center" (convention center) is the exception: it is a dark grey/brown, hulking cube with no architectural features whatsoever to relieve its monolithic appearance.
The highways here are large, with lots of lanes and proper banking on the curves, which makes for fairly pleasant driving. Still, there are signs to remind everyone of the 3258 traffic fatalities in 2012. I had to look up the rate to get some perspective. Texas has 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles. Arizona is at 1.8. Montana is the highest in the nation at 2.0. The lowest rate in the nation? Massachusetts, at 0.6. The old joke is that we never get going fast enough to hurt anyone badly before we crash into each other. Still, all of these rates are half of what they were 20 years ago, thanks to seat belts, air bags, energy-absorbing bumpers, and so on.
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