While camping in the Texas panhandle my family went sight seeing. There are a lot of wonderful things to see and do in the Texas panhandle area so we found a beautiful campsite, set up camp and stayed a few days do and see those things.
Most people think of Texas as flat and barren, Texas is both and neither. It is such a huge state that you can pretty much find any type of landscape you wish somewhere within its' border, beaches, mountains, barren cliffs, flat barren land, etc. Texas has sand storms in certain parts of the state. Now, if you have never been in a sand storm you may think that would be pretty awesome and actually it kind of is; if you happen to be in a house!
In the particular sand storm we experienced on our camping trip to the panhandle, it really wasn't so awesome. We had just returned to our campsite from a site seeing trip and had begun to disperse around our campsite when we saw the sand storm approaching. We quickly tried to cover or put away what we could because we did not want to have everything covered in sand. We hadn't gotten too far in our efforts when the sand hit, driven by very high winds. First off, sand driven by high winds feels like you are being sand blasted, IT HURTS. Your skin gets raw pretty fast, especially since we were wearing shorts and short sleeve shirts. We tried to hold everything down. Kathy, my youngest sister, was in the six man tent which was being held down by tent stakes every two to three feet around the perimeter. The storm howled and raged, all of a sudden the tent stakes were being pulled up at the front of the tent and the tent was beginning to try to fly away and Kathy was still in it. The rest of the family all jumped on the tent, all our weight did not stop the tent from trying to fly away, we just impeded its progress. That was some wild ride, the winds flipped the tent and us around like we weighed nothing. We held onto that tent for dear life because our little sister was inside. We saw other tents go flying by and hoped no one was inside any of them.
Finally, after what seemed to be hours but I am sure was a much more abbreviated length of time the storm sped past and things settled down. We started to look around and were shocked at the amount of sand and dirt that had been deposited on everything in that short length of time. Pretty much everything was unrecognizable, just lumps of sandy dirt. We got Kathy out of the tent immediately and started to check things out. Nothing was actually broken and most of our equipment was still there thanks to the couple of minutes warning we had but our faces, THEY were amazing.
We all looked like mud monsters. Our ears were packed with sand and dirt so tight we could barely hear, we had to dig the sand out of our ear canals! Our eyes had little mud packs in the corners that had to be dug out. Our hair was so dull and stood up at all angles because the sand had scrubbed into our hair and scalp. Every crease in our body had sand in it, even those covered by clothes. Our skin stung because it had been scoured. We turned into mud puddles as we cleaned up camp and sweated. Literally everything had to be swept or washed. Sand storms drive sand in every tiny spot there is.
No comments:
Post a Comment