A 30 minute drive through the surprisingly beautiful countryside led us to the Palo Duro Canyon State Park. (Side note: I say “surprisingly beautiful” because my only impression of Texas is Houston….in the summer. All I remember is flat, you could see forever, and hot, the whole atmosphere shimmering with the heat. I thought I had died and gone to hell…oh wait, that was Oklahoma (but on the same trip). But i have no recollection of Texas being beautiful.) The countryside here is small mounds, not really hills, with trees and various colors of green shrubs.

So you are driving through this fairly flat landscape and then you get to see a little of what the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River did to the landscape millions of years ago. There is the second largest canyon in the U.S., the Palo Duro Canyon. The canyon is 120 miles long and as wide as 20 miles across with a depth of about 800 feet. Since it is not very deep, you drive to the bottom of the canyon and drive and hike around the floor of the canyon. It is a cool perspective, looking up out of the canyon instead of looking down into it. The canyon is quite beautiful with very cool rock formations, lots of wild flowers, and a road runner or two. We spent several hours driving and hiking around before the sky became pretty threatening.

The RV Museum was next. I know, this does not sound like a stop we would make but they advertised some very neat vintage RV’s so we went for it. And they really did have some awesome RV’s. But probably the coolest thins was there was free admission and it is on the lot of a huge RV dealership. One of the salesman has to walk you back to the museum so you don’t get lost yet never a word was uttered about looking at their RV’s. They have the museum there simply because the owner refurbished most of the RV’s himself and he just wants to show them off!

Dinner tonight was at the Big Texan Steak Ranch, one of those places everyone should experience once in their lives. They have the “eat it in one hour and it is free” deal and the title holder is a 120 lb woman who ate 2 72 oz steaks, 6 fried shrimp, a salad, a dinner roll, and a baked potato is about 10 minutes!!!!!!

Our leftover steak made a great addition to the scrambled eggs at the hotel breakfast the next morning!