Confederate Camels?

As you can see, Mom and I are getting pretty good at taking pictures of ourselves--this one is from Chillicothe, Texas. I'm a little late getting to the blog this evening, so as far as I am concerned, it is still April 27 (Grandpa Taylor's birthday!), but my computer says it's April 28. Today as we drove across the extremely large and flat state of Texas, we saw the usual cows, horses, sheep, some Texas longhorns, and even some buffalo, which all seemed pretty much like what you would see while driving across Texas . . . until we saw the camels! Yes, camels. We did a double-take as we drove by, and sure enough--there was this herd of camels out in someone's field. There was even a cute little baby camel! We were trying to figure out how camels would have gotten to Texas, and we decided that they must be descendants from the ones Jefferson Davis brought over to the U. S. back in the day. You see, before the Civil War when Jeff Davis became the President of the Confederate States of America, he served as the U. S. Secretary of War to President Franklin Pierce. He had this bright idea to bring camels over here to use for military transportation--since they could go for so long without water. Well, the idea didn't catch on very well, but maybe the camels we saw today are the great, great grandchildren of Jeff Davis's camels? Anyway, it has been a really long driving day. As Mom and I drove through places like Denton, Texas, where they had severe flooding just the night before last, and had to pull people out of cars that were getting washed away in flash floods, we were again reminded how grateful we are to have missed the bad weather by a couple of days. The weather was great today, and Stryder worked perfectly, so it was all good until we got to Dallas during rush-hour. We weren't even actually in Dallas--just on the outskirts--but it still took us a few hours to make our way around the city. Tonight we stopped in Longview, Texas, and are planning to make the last leg of the drive across Louisiana and to Mississippi tomorrow. Internet access in Natchez is questionable at best, so I don't think I'll be able to post any more entries until I start work next Tuesday (I have a haunch that Miss Betty doesn't have wireless internet at Routhland!), but I will write more as soon as an internet connection is available. It feels good to be this close to our destination--even though we're still two states away!