Friday, September 15
A Note from your faithful correspondent: These posts are written, edited, and posted with pictures culled from the day's photos and captions, after a full day of traveling. I am working on a Chromebook at an improvised desk in a hotel room. So I don't have my usual tools, and I am at the end of a long day. I am having a great time going over our day, and sharing this trip with you, but you are more likely to see typos and glitches because so much of this is quick and off-the-cuff. I apologize for any goofs that slip through, and hope you'll forgive the slapdash nature of some of these posts.
This morning we took a little tour around Tucumcari, a city that we fell in love with our last time through in 2021. There are lots of interesting things to see, including a really great dinosaur museum. We spent an afternoon there on our last trip, and that’s where we got Dash Dino. This time though we didn’t want to take time for the museum, but we did hit the gift shop, looking for a companion for Dash Dino. While we were debating which dino to adopt we got to talking with the woman in the gift shop, explaining what we were doing. She asked if we had a picture of Dash Dino, which I gladly showed her, and she asked me to send it to her for their Facebook page. When she handed me her card with the email address, I realized she was the Executive Director of the museum, which is affiliated with Mesalands Community College. So now we have a new friend in Tucumcari, and a new dino for the dash.
Meet Chonk!
Outside the museum there were some nifty wire dinosaur sculptures. They weren’t easy to get good photos of, but I wanted to share them with you.
Dino sculptures, Getting pictures of wire-frame statues isn’t easy, but they really are cool.
Our first task completed, we went in search of food before hitting the road. Tucumcari has a variety of restaurants, and we decided on Kix on Route 66 - because who could resist that name? Also, we’d eaten there before and knew the food was good and the prices reasonable. We got the seat directly behind the truck on the front of the building, which was kind of cool.
There’s a truck in front of Kix.
And we sat right behind it!
We had yummy breakfast, piled into the car with full stomachs, topped up the gas tank, and got back on the road.
We drove from New Mexico, through Texas, and into Oklahoma before stopping for the night.
Along the way we saw the amazing windmill farms of north Texas, which march across the vast landscape for many miles, and we made a stop in Shamrock, Texas, to do a little research for a project Steve is working on.
Windmills spread for miles across the plains in north Texas. Impressive!
Shamrock, for those of you who may not know, provided the template for Luigi’s Garage in the movie Cars. An old Conoco gas station has been restored into a visitors’ center, (the inspiration for the movie) and there is a museum here that we also didn’t have time for. We are having to pick and choose which things we explore on this trip, and we find ourselves often saying “Maybe on the way back.” Of course if we do all those things on the way back we’ll be lucky to be home in time for Christmas!
If you’ve seen Cars, this might look familiar.
We were told this station is in the process of being restored.
Chonk and Dash Dino decided to photobomb Steve’s picture.
More pictures from Shamrock. Tiny town with lots to see!
There was one other little thing in Shamrock, something I hadn’t even realized had disappeared from my world: the sound of a car rolling over the gas station “dinger,” the cable that rang a bell to alert the attendant that a car was at the pump. I heard one this afternoon while parked outside the visitors’ center in Shamrock, and it made me smile. It’s amazing how a simple sound can evoke such a strong response.
Once past Shamrock we started looking for a place to stop for the night. We found a small casino about 50 miles west of Oklahoma City, which will make for an easy start in the morning. Their restaurant served an inexpensive Friday fish special, and the hotel is decent, so we are settled in tonight and will see the rest of Oklahoma and at least part of Arkansas tomorrow.
Today we listened to:
The rest of Joy, Craig Ferguson’s podcast with guest Diedrich Bader;
Cautionary Tales, about the architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, a megaproject that went over budget by 400%, over schedule by a decade, and is arguably the most beautiful building in the world;
Cabinet of Curiosities, a short episode about how Hollywood special effects experts helped solve the mysterious deaths of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959; and
Another How Did This Get Made, which we have not finished. This episode is about the movie The Secret, and it’s something I definitely do not want to see, so I should thank the crew for warning me about this one.
Once again I am writing late into the night. I blame the time zone changes - it’s getting late a lot earlier the last couple days - but before I go I do want to offer each of you a little gift: a postcard from the road. Just drop me a private message with your real world address and I will send you one of the souvenir postcards I’ve been buying at our various stops. I think I have a postcard problem; I can’t go into a gift shop without coming out with a handful of colorful cards!