My first foray into the Texas Panhandle – Trip 3 of this adventure – was an education – from the School of Hard Knocks. The Panhandle winds were brutal, and made every courthouse visited like a notch on a gun. While it was a great adventure, the motorcycling part of it was not fun.
So I was not naive when I set out to tour the area that I’m calling the “lower Panhandle”, meaning everything south of the actual Panhandle, the rectangular part of northernmost Texas, and mostly north of I-10, which runs from San Antonio to El Paso. Probably a better label for that area is the one used by three distinguished musicians from that area – Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore – who formed the legendary band called “The Flatlanders”. Here’s the circuit, in dark yellow:
As with Trip 3, I have too much photographic material for this trip to do it in a single post, so it’s being broken down into the four separate days of the trip.
This trip added 1,713 miles and 38 counties, and was anything but flat. Here’s the map after Trip 4:
