Route 66: Amarillo to Tucumcari

First destination for the day was Palo Duro Canyon, but we didn’t get to drive for very long as most of it was closed due to recent heavy rain, so we only saw a very small part. We went to a couple of viewpoints, saw a farrier who was fitting new shoes on a horse’s hooves (and got a fright when somebody started flying a drone). We went to the visitors’ centre as well where they had some info about how the natives were gotten rid of and the Civilian Conservation Corps created under Rossevelt during the depression years. They also had interesting pottery for sale made with horse hair.

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Next on the schedule was a ranch visit right next to the entrance to the national park. They had horses, donkeys, longhorn cows. The owner (Case) drove us around in a Humvee first and then a side-by-side to see the canyon from up high, and to show us some of his longhorn cows.

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The recent heavy rains caused quite a bit of flooding on the nearby farms as well.

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Cadillac Ranch was the next stop, to see the now very colourful ten cars surrounded by mud slurry and empty cans just left on the ground.

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Adrian was a semi-ghost town where there is the famous bent door at Midway Station cafe, where we stopped to have one of their Ugly Crust pies for lunch. Here a Republican old lady lectured us about how great Trump was (being the working class man that he is) and how Biden gave their social services pensions to the Ukraininians, meaning that she now couldn’t retire for a few more years (none of that true when we fact-checked later). The cherry pie and vegetarian burger were quite nice though.

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Another interesting stop was the Russell’s Truck Stop, where they have an interesting small museum on Route 66. Nearby is what used to be called “Jericho Gap”, the last section of R66 to be paved. The land is very fertile but also muddy, so off road trips are not recommended. We could also see fields watered by bog wheeled sprinklers. The green change in landscape was obvious again and it wasn’t only the colour as we changed altitude quite a bit too and approached 4,000 ft.

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This area is tornado alley but it must be pretty windy at other times as well, as there were lots of windmills and trees “leaning into the wind”.

We crossed into New Mexico in the afternoon and last stop for the day was the Mesalands Community College Dinosaur Museum where we met Axel, a very enthusiastic paleontologist and professor of German background, who designed a method to cast dinosaur fossils in bronze so that non-paleontologists can see and touch them as well.

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We stayed at the Blue Bird motel in Tucumcari. The motel has a lot of neon signs as well but many of them had been damaged by a recent hail storm so we couldn’t fully enjoy them.

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