Change of Address

The first day of July 2016 finds us in the town that we both grew up in.  Our time here was from the mid-1950's until the mid-1980's with a short break for being away for school and the first job after graduation (which was only 175 miles away).  The next thirty years were in Georgia with a brief, 4-year period in Oklahoma.  Borger was built and has continued to exist for one reason - oil.  It is an oil town through and through with the worlds largest inland refinery as its economic engine and pumping oil out of the ground a close second.  As the oil business has risen and fallen so has the town.  But the busts have outweighed the booms and the town is a little worse for the wear.  We remember when we were kids in school, the population hovered around 20,000 at times.  Now they are lucky if they can say that there are 12,000 residents.  Many of the refinery employees make the 50 mile commute from Amarillo every day to work.

No commute for us.  Our spot in the city park puts us close to everything, including a busy 4-lane lane road to the left and a huge rail switching yard on the other side of the road.  They start banging those tanker rail cars around at about 4:00 am.

If it were not for oil, ranching would be the dominate profession with the likes of the 6666 Ranch, Johnson Ranch, Crutch Ranch, and Arrington Ranch, to name a few, surrounding the community and occupying multiple counties.  There is a pretty good mix of hardhats and cowboy hats around.

Both our dad's started their families as oil men.  Cyndee's was a foreman in the refinery and mine a tool dresser on a drilling rig and later a pumper on leases.  Like the town, our families have seen loss and change.  Both of Cyndee's parents are gone and my dad.  My mother has remarried, 20-some years ago now and he is both a wearer of hard hat and cowboy hat.  They have built up a horse boarding operation as a side-business but it is now a full-time retirement occupation.

Mare and colt at the barn.

 The barn has become for us like the kitchen is for many families.  It is the gathering place.  Birthdays, holidays and just-for-the-heck-of-it days are all a reason to meet at the barn.  In fact, there was so much time being spent out there that a corner of the barn was set aside for a cantina.

An old fashioned cantina complete with wood burning stove.

Bar-B-Q's are not uncommon at the barn.

Head Honcho

Something new to the barn this year, miniature donkeys.
These guys will follow you around like a puppy dog.
They are a lot heavier but not much taller than a Great Dane.

Like I have been talking about the last several posts, it has been raining in copious amounts for months.  The panhandle has been a benefactor of this rain and the high desert has come alive.

The high desert in bloom.
Cottonwoods and flowers in early spring before the trees have put on leaves.

Hay is abundant this year.  We saw stacks like this all across
the state with hay fields almost ready for a second harvest.
It was not long ago that the drought was so bad that they were bringing
hay in from as far away as Montana.

One of the things we can always count on when returning to the panhandle - gorgeous sunsets!

Our time is up at the city park and we have been scouting someplace to stay that has full hookups and allows month-long stays.  Borger being the industrial town that it is, there are several RV parks in the area that were built with the work-camper in mind.  The town swells and shrinks with transient workers doing skilled labor such as welding and pipe-fitting.  Lucky for us we are in town when the plants were between turn-a-rounds or upgrades and we had choices.  Unfortunately, none of these choices included anyplace that could be taken for a garden or natural setting.  When our choice was made we only moved two blocks from our current location.  While it may have been close, it was starkly different from our city park setting.  We are now sitting on an aggregate of crumbled asphalt and gravel, adjacent to the rail switching yard I mentioned earlier.  An eight foot tall metal fence is all that separates us from a 10-rail wide switching yard that handles nothing but volatile hydrocarbons and hazardous chemicals.  Yikes!

It may be a parking lot next to a rail yard but we have full hook-ups and a clear shot at the satellites.

Panhandle sunsets can even make this place look good.

The 4th of July started out looking okay but as the day wore on the heat exceeded our limit for sitting on a blanket atop Texas red clay to wait for fireworks.  We stayed in and as it turned out it was probably good that we did since John ended up with a nasty wisdom tooth ache.