Corn maze & dust devils

I'm a little behind on my posting... these photos are from last Thursday when I interviewed the owner of a corn maze near Lubbock. I really, really enjoyed this interview. Here are a couple photos of the property. Notice how green it is -- they irrigate a lot... but one of their underground wells is going dry...

I learned that they actually make the maze design in the corn by hand. I guess I assumed a computer did it or something. It's a very time-intensive process.
Then I had a five hour drive back to campus. I took a different route from my drive out the previous day. And I spent about two of the five hours driving through the Middle of Nowhere, Texas. I was so much in The Middle of Nowhere that I didn't even have cell phone service. And at one point there were only two stations that came in strong enough for the radio to even recognize! And, really, somebody should have warned me to fill up my gas tank before I left the city. I got lucky... but it was a close call!

But... it was beautiful. Most of the time I was completely by myself on the road. I pulled over a couple times just to snap a photo.
I also had my first encounters with dust devils and, I must admit, I'm pretty enamored with them. If you don't know what a dust devil is, check out the wikipedia page about them. Basically, they're like tornadoes but not nearly as strong. It was a very hot, sunny day, and the middle of my drive was lots of dry, flat land. It was perfect conditions for dust devil formations, and I saw over 25 of them during my drive home!

In fact, I actually drove through a couple of them. The first time it happened, it was a little disturbing. I was driving on a highway, and I saw it forming on the other side of the road up ahead of me. Here are my thoughts for the next five seconds after seeing it:
"Oh, wow! A dust devil! Oh, look, it's moving across the road... I wonder what would happen if I drive--WHOA! [a couple words I won't repeat here] Holy crap! ... [deep breath] That was so cool!"

The dust devil actually pushed/blew my car over a couple feet, and I had to quickly turn the steering wheel and get back in the middle of the lane. I wasn't in any real danger, but it was pretty scary at the moment that it happened.

I tried diligently to get a good photo of a dust devil for ya'll. (Yes, I just wrote "ya'll.") I mostly failed. Since I did put in so much effort, though, I'm going to upload photos anyway! You'll have to use quite a bit of imagination with the first two.

Look for the light brown dust on the far left side right above the trees. It was disappearing as I snapped the photo.
Look at the right side of the road in the distance in this one
In these next two, I'm pretty sure you'll actually be able to see it. This one lasted long enough for me to snap two photos. Look at the silos.
Pretty cool, huh? :)