Day 1:
Heading south on the I25, 4:40pm – a bend in the road! Wow! (seriously, I made a note of the time).
Day 2:
This was a little more interesting, we’d spent the night in Las Vegas (NM not NV) and it was bloomin’ freezing. We were still heading south on the I25 today, but when we got to Socorro we took the 60 west for a bit so we could see the rather unimaginatively named VLA (Very Large Array), this is a radio astronomy telescope made up of 27 antennas with 25m dishes. It’s used by astronomers all over the US for various projects from studying the sun to various distant galaxies, each antenna can be moved on the tracks to span a distance of 13miles apart along each arm, at the largest configuration larger than the city of Washington DC It would take a antenna with a dish of 17miles wide to do what the VLA can do. It was pretty cool to see it all in operation – even better that is was free! Dan got very excited in his geeky Si-Fi way as it was in the film ‘Contact’ with Jodie Foster.
After driving 45miles in the wrong direction we thought we should get back on track and headed along the 380 east past the ‘Trinity Site’ – the site of the first nuclear bomb – we didn’t hang around and found a nice quiet place down the road to camp only to discover a leaking hub seal on the rear axle. As we were camped on BLM land in the middle of a field essentially, it was quite a way to the nearest town so we thought it best not to start the job here and put it on the ‘list of things to do tomorrow’.
Day 3:
Oh dear. Roswell. Well, it had to be done! We pulled up on Main Street to be faced with the funniest street lamps, I think I might ask HCC to introduce these in Eastleigh:
Roswell, as you probably know is the alleged site of an Alien space craft landing in the 1940’s which was confirmed by a member of the armed forces then quickly denied with several follow up stories including a weather balloon, Air Force dummy and probably several other things. We popped into the UFO Museum which was actually quite well done! I expected the worst I think, but they did a good job of trying to present both sides of the story when we could see they wanted to say ‘It was Alien’s!!’. Lots of eye witness accounts of the ‘spacecraft’ crash and subsequent search for bits of spacecraft and a bit of info on some interesting things like crop circles, ancient history etc. with only a few accounts sounding like they’d come from completely mad people :-)
Everything in the town was alien themed, even the Walmart had a spacecraft painted on the side and lots of inflatable Alien’s inside, but we liked them as they didn’t mind us using their car park to change the hub seal. Dan set to work and I went into do the shopping, I think he got the better deal! But, the people of Roswell are very friendly, a total of 6 vehicles stopped to see if we needed help/bits which was pretty good of them as we were well out the way at the back of the car park.
Job completed and we headed up on to the most hell-ish part of the trip for me – and the reason for the thread title – we were going towards… Amarillo. ARGH! 2 days of Dan signing ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’ is enough to drive anyone insane, good job they didn’t have an international airport or I probably would have been on the next flight home, lol!
As we crossed into Texas the Cattle Ranch’s began. Wow, these places are HUGE! Pen’s of cows as far as the eye could see, only separated by HUGE farm buildings and the odd HUGE dust storm (everything in Texas is HUGE!). As we crossed over the border we headed back into Central Time so lost an hour of travelling time so we decided to head to a KOA on the other side of Amar… no, I can’t even bring myself to type the word anymore! Did you know that place sits atop 90% of the worlds Helium? And I didn’t see one balloon :-( This win’s the award for the most noisy campsite we’ve stayed at, we should of known as in the brochure it stated ‘no interstate noise!’ but failed to mention the airport *next door* and the rail road the other next door. Lol!
As it was our only night in Texas we thought it right that we should go out for a good ‘ol Steak Dinner, and as recommended headed for The Big Texan - this win’s the award for the tackiest, yet funniest place we’ve eaten so far.
On the menu was basically every type of Steak you could imagine (don’t come in here looking for a salad) as well as some local delicacies such as fried Rattlesnake. Mmm, tasty! Our server was wearing a big hat and cowboy boots and the whole place was decked out like a huge dancehall/saloon. We thought we’d been caught in some really touristy restaurant only to realise practically everyone eating in there was local! Lol! We did get our server to admit he usually wears trainers and a baseball cap though, not the cowboy boots and huge hat he was working in. Still, the staff were friendly and the food was good so in my book that makes it a pretty good place to eat and apparently one of the most popular on Route 66.
Day 4:
Following on from eating at one of the most famous places on Route 66 we headed north on the I40 following the direction of the old road to Clinton and the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum. On the way though we stopped at the Cadillac Ranch. One of Amarillo’s eccentric helium millionaires has ‘planted’ 10 Cadillacs in one of his fields next to the I40, it’s to show the different fins that were part of the designs from 1949 – 1963 and is open for people to decorate/graffti as they please, in fact, there were some cans lying around to encourage you to do just that!
We left our mark and wandered back onto the interstate heading for a Barnes and Noble, this made us very happy as we managed to get hold of a LRM so we could catch up on all the news from the UK Land Rover scene… boy, Billing was a bit wet eh?! Good write-up for Simon and X-Eng, and Shire got a couple of mentions too.
As we’d done quite a few bits of the actual route 66 as it exists now on our journey, we were keen to find out a little more. For $3 each the museum was a bargain and I’d highly recommend it. They’ve managed to salvage as many bits and pieces as they can and reproduced a few others to give an accurate account of the history of the road from LA to Chicago and everything in between. It was quite sad though and a living example of what happens when you build interstates (or bypasses in the UK) as many of the communities, or at least the businesses, disappeared once the new roads bypassed their towns and passing trade disappeared.
We stopped the night just west of Oklahoma City to yet another freezing evening and a night of going to bed with a warm hat on. We’ve had quite a few of these now and it seems to be becoming a theme with central America, warm days and then waking up to find all the water around us frozen (and Dan’s toothpaste – lol!). So, today we’re heading south even if we have to drive until Midnight!
Oo, better go, we turn off in 177miles…quick, get the map out…
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