A travel day - Checotah OK to Amarillo TX - 367 miles. On this leg I stopped at a couple "attractions."
First was one of the MANY Route 66 Museums you'll find along I40 (which basically replaced and followed the route of old US 66). This one is in Elk City OK and bills itself as "THE National Route 66 Museum." I assure you the "National" refers to Route 66, not the museum. This place is a little more blatant than others in trying to drag you off the interstate. They even use brown on white signs that look like National Park signs -- is this an honest mistake? I think not. Anyhow, the $5 admission gets you into the National Route 66 Museum, their Old Town Museum & Rodeo Hall and their Farm & Ranch Museum. The Route 66 Museum by itself is well done, but very small - just two 40x40 rooms with a couple period cars and lots of "artifacts" from the heyday of travel on Route 66. The artifacts are mostly pieces collected from old gas stations, restaurants, motels and roadside attractions. This Route 66 museum by itself is not worth the $5. Add in the other two museums, then perhaps it is. The Old Town Museum is a reconstruction of an old western town and a building full of 50's and 60's memorabilia - granny's attic so to speak. The Rodeo Hall features rodeo memorabilia from the same period -- mostly from one family of rodeo stock producers. The Farm & Ranch Museum has a large collection of early farm machinery and implements including tractors, threshers, cultivators and windmills.
Here's a shot of the
front of the Museum from the road (RT 66).
Here's a corner of the
"replica" town. All of the storefronts are closed to entry. Many of the
windows display period exhibits (complete with grotesquely un-lifelike
manikins).
Here's one of the
windmills. This is a wind driven DC generator that puts out 6, 12, 24 or 32
volts depending on the version you had. The attached sign says they were
used primarily to power a radio or two before rural electrification brought
power to remote farming areas. The sign also indicates they were
manufactured from 1930 through 1950. Well, I've got news for them, I was
installing these as a part of remote (very remote!) radio repeaters as late
as the late 60's and early 70's - and they were new, freshly manufactured
units.
The next stop is the Devil's Rope museum in
McLean TX. They also have a corner of their museum dedicated to their
version of a Route 66 museum. Here's a shot of the front of the place. See
their website at
http://www.barbwiremuseum.com.
Admission to the museum is free but they do ask for a donation.
You might be inclined to trivialize barbed wire, but actually, this museum and the history of barbed wire is pretty impressive. The collection included not just "Barbed Wire" (some 2000 distinctly different kinds), but anything related to barbed wire -- fencing and fence posts, fencing tools and stretchers, post-hole diggers, staples and barbed wire and fencing manufacturing machines. Barbed wire, along with windmills (pumping water) and the railroads, shaped the development of the west (Ok, you might include one more - Oil). Today, you can see hundreds of thousands of miles of barbed wire fences, windmills still pumping water for the herds of livestock and thousands of miles of railroads still taking goods to major markets.
I made it to the west of Amarillo by 5:00 pm and installed myself in the Ft Amarillo RV Park just off I40.
Thursday, 10/23/2003, Day 10.
Another travel day, Amarillo TX to Grants NM - 356 miles.
As luck would have it, the RV Park in Amarillo is off the same exit as the Cadillac Ranch, a "monument" created by the Ant Farm Collective (a hippy commune) in 1974. The display is a row of half-buried vintage Cadillacs planted nose first in the dirt. Each is from a different year reflecting the rise and fall of the Cadillac tail-fin. This is an "interactive" art display and visitors are welcome to use it as their own canvas. I didn't have a can of spray paint with me or would have added my own message - had I, just what would I have said?
Up close at dawn.
These things look like they have many layers of graffiti on them so I would
guess that you'd get a different picture on each visit!
My favorite. I always
did like this year - nice fin.
Apparently, some where along the trail, I slipped into another time zone - Mountain - and gained another hour. Unaware of this, I've been running an hour ahead of everyone else - which is why I left before dawn this morning and arrived so early in Grants. Interestingly, I didn't figure this out until late Friday evening!!
So what's in Grants you might ask. Virtually nothing I might reply. That is, until I found out an interesting National Monument is nearby - El Malpais - roughly translated as "the badlands" in Spanish. The "badlands" is made up of 100,000 acres of lava flow, cinder cones, spatter cones and a lava tube cave system extending some 17 miles. Surrounding the National Monument area is another 100,000 acres of National Conservation area and Wilderness. The Wilderness area encompasses extensive sandstone formations, bluffs, mesas and plains.
One of the attractions, the La Ventana Natural Arch, is easy to reach so I decide to check it out today after I get the MH set up.