TAHOKA!!

(Note: This is an old post and I have not visited this place in years. By this time it might be the best place in the world to live.)

Tahoka is not a joke-ah, but a small town of not much more than 2000 inhabitants about 40 miles south of Lubbock on Highway 87. I've driven through the place over the course of many years, but never until recently have I taken one of the three exits into the town. My wife and I did that last Sunday. I took with me a Canon A610 Powershot camera I bought for $2.50 at an estate sale the day before. The camera had no case or instructions. It had no SD card and the shutter button was gone. I downloaded instructions from Canon's website, read reviews online, and installed a spare 1 gig SD card, and made a shutter button from a standard thumbtack and a bit of double-side foam tape. Works great. I failed to check the lens before I used the camera in Tahoka. It was smudged but I cleaned the lens later and now this camera is perfectly useable. I had a spare USB connector that mates it to my computer and downloaded the software I needed to make the camera and computer communicate. This dirt cheap camera is so good, I found a used one on eBay for $30 and bought it for my wife. That one has the CD ROM, an SD card, and a connector, and the instruction manual. 

Tahoka is losing population and is rather depressing. This small town has been by-passed by the oil boom. Most of the streets are in poor repair, the downtown area is full of abandoned buildings, and I can't understand why anyone would stay there. There is a lot of low-income government housing. Tahoka offers NOTHING. No festivals, no tourist events, no attractions of any kind. I wonder about the city's leadership. Tahoka, at present, seems to have no future.

Here is the first set of photos, a mixed bag. I will do several installments of these.

More to come...