As we left Amarillo heading south to Lubbock we could see and feel the wind had picked up substantially. We drove down I-27 and could see what appeared to be a haze of low cloud hanging over the road. Eventually we realised it was dust. The wind was blowing hard, all the trees were bent against the prevailing wind, even a barn was lopsided and bent.
Tumbleweeds blew continuously across the road. It’s rather disconcerting to drive through and over tumbleweeds, I kept thinking they were getting stuck under the car. This is how they propagate and seed themselves, but I don’t know how they grow, I must look it up. Do the seeds take root where they land, the plants grow, then dry out and start tumbling? It’s a curious phenomenon.
This is the prairie, the plains, it’s flat, open country, and when the wind blows it picks up the dust from the dry fields and hurls it along, together with the tumbleweeds. Every so often we’ll see a pile of tumbleweed blown up against a fence, stopped for a while in its endless roll across the plains.
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