The one-horse towns of Texas
Leg 5 - OK City - though Elk City, OK - Erick and Texola, OK - Shamrock, Groom, Amarillo, Vega, and Adrian, TX - stop in Tucumcari, NM
Out again early this morning for the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, OK. We weren’t sure we’d be able to find the museum because I didn’t have an address for it. Driving down the business loop for Route 40 (most of the “business loops” for the major highway out here is the Old Route 66) it loomed in the distance. “Kris, I think we found it.”
We took lots of pictures. We got the history spoken to us, and the museum definitely had a lot of cool things. I hope Kris can upload everything I wanted pictures of. We picked up a couple postcards. We tried to send them out, but not only did they not have stamps in the store (! even though they had a little mail box), and the stamps I thought I had in the car were not actually there. Oops.
In our attempt to send the postcards out, I searched the GPS for the nearby towns mentioned on my map, and in my info from roadtripusa.com. I was completely in awe of the towns we passed through. Literally nothing was there, except for the skeletons of buildings from years gone by. Kris and I wondered why it wasn’t torn down, but it’s probably because it would cost too much, and noone out there has any money to do so. The only thing that used to be in Erick, OK was the 100th Meridian Museum, but I didn’t see it so it must be long gone. It had bragging rights to being the border town, before the border was realigned, and also was thought of as the end of the habitable world, west of which was “The Great American Desert.”
We finally DID find the post office - the one that’s for the entire county. We’re driving on the road, and Kris exclaims, “Oh my god, I found the post office.” Inside was a woman old enough to be my grandmother, with her name badge. Like everyone who comes into the PO doesn’t know who she is! “Hey Mary, how’s it going?” The PO was in Texola - on the border of Texas and Oklahoma.
Our next stop was in Shamrock, TX where Rt. 66 and Rt. 83 (The Road to Nowhere) meet up. We stopped at McD’s for a quick lunch (and a Shamrock Shake in August!), took a picture of the restored Conaco gas station, and got back on the highway.
Groom, Texas holds two tourist attractions - a gahuge cross, which you can see for miles outside of the town, and a water tower, on the westbound exit. It must have been hit by a tornado, but it leans like the Tower of Pisa.
You’ll see…Amarillo - which we passed right through. Even this lone city on Rt. 66 through Texas was tiny. We stopped at Cadillac Ranch. Strangely, it’s the biggest tourist attraction in Amarillo. It’s just 10 cars buried in the ground. In the middle of nowhere. Quite strange. What else can I say about it? Of course we took a bunch of pictures. A couple from San Antonio (yes, they know New Braufals) took a picture of us together.
Once again we stopped. We tried to get a piece of pie at the MidPoint Cafe in Adrian, TX. But much like every other part of Rt. 66 in Texas, it was closed! So instead we had to settle for just a few pictures. Perhaps the people went on vacation for Labor Day. Perhaps they just decided nobody would be stopping by. Perhaps, sadly, they are going to be completely closing up shop. Who knows, but I’m really disappointed.
Our final stop was Tucumcari Tonight! I mean, Tucumcari, NM. We stopped at this cute little dinosaur museum right here in town, which I thought was going to be totally hokey, and was surprisingly pretty cool. We’re up and running again on the internet. This will probably be the last time we post for a couple days, since we’re camping tomorrow night. Another disappointment is that Kris’s friend Joe has to work on Sunday and can’t meet up with us as we’d planned - and this is the closest we’re going to be to him - at least for a few months.
