Just an update from this morning.  I am so glad our wifi died!  Otherwise, we would have missed one beautiful drive in the Oklahoma countryside and left with the wrong impression of this lovely state.  As nice as the scenery is from the interstate (really), it can’t compare with a two-hour drive down small two lane roads through incredibly beautiful cattle ranches and windmill farms.   I was wrong about the consistently flat terrain.  Today took us over gently rolling hills with horizons so distant they seemed contrived.  The weather was perfect today — 71 degrees and sunny with an azure sky and white clouds that Constable would have had trouble improving on.  The fields were alternately bright spring green dotted with cattle and that delicious whitish gold of hay that fades into purple as it nears the horizon.  I particularly am moved by the sight of huge rolls of hay parked here and there in meticulous fields – it breaks my heart to think of all the sweat, hope, faith and risk that went into getting it to that stage and knowing that even now the bales sit vulnerable to weather, mold, spontaneous fire and market forces.  Farming is one tough occupation and it is clearly the main thing going on here.  We even saw a pasture of great horned buffalo.

On a happy note,  we noticed some of those tremendous white three-blade windmills in a field.  Brad of course knows exactly how they work and that the speed of the outer tips of the blades is 170 MPH, even though they look like they are spinning at a leisurely pace.  He said there is a turbine in the center of the blades that makes a tremendous amount of electricity.  We estimated that there were about 50 such windmills.  Then we rounded a bend and realized that they stretched as far as we could see for several miles!  We revised our estimate to several thousand.  Curious, I googled “windmill farms in Oklahoma” and was amazed to learn that a $3.5 billion, 800 mile, Plains and Eastern Clean Line transmission line, when completed in 2017, will have the capacity to deliver 7,000 megawatts of wind power.  Wind power accounted for almost 15% of the electricity generated in Oklahoma last year.  According to wikipedia, the western half of OK is in America’s wind tunnel, a corridor stretching from North Dakota to the Texas panhandle. OK has the potential of generating 1.5 million gigawatt hours of electricity per year, which is over one third of all the electricity generated in the US in 2011.  Of course, OK has always (since the early 20th century) been one of the largest oil producers  in the world.  OK will continue to produce more energy than it uses, but increasingly from wind rather than oil.

An interesting aside: Oklahoma  City is in the very center of the United States.  Pretty cool.

Pictures from this afternoon did not do justice to the real thing.  So here is Doris coming in for a drink at the end of a great day.

Doris calls it a day