"It must be some piece of a NASA spaceship”

If you have ever had the “luxury” of driving through Middle America, then it stands to reason that at some point you have seen a vast setting of windmills. From a distance these windmills lure the same illusion as ants crawling on the ground. At first it seems there are just a few, maybe a dozen, but the longer you look it becomes clear that the ground is crawling with a colony, the hillside littered with windmills. If these vast stretches of windmills don’t quite impress, it may be because it is hard to grasp the immense size of a single unit.



In the drive from Austin to Big Bend, we were “fortunate” to pass large realms of these windmills. At some point in the drive, just as we crested a hilltop and gazed upon the next stretch of highway, we saw off in the distance a large motorcade of “oversized load” vehicles. I am used to seeing large tractors or mobile homes occupying the bed of these beastly trucks, so the sight of a gleaming aerodynamic structure took us by surprise. “It must be some piece of a NASA spaceship” we hypothesized. It wasn’t.



What we had come across were the blades of these enormous windmills being transported. Each one of these blades which sit high on the windmills must have been 80 feet long, tipping the total height of the structures at about 250 feet tall (Statue of Liberty height - 305 feet). Seeing these blades up close really gives some dimension to seeing hundreds of them along the horizon.