7th August 2000

Last night, Are You Being Served was on TV. Along the bottom of the screen, was a phone number for making pledges, and sometimes names scrolled across the bottom -- "Mrs. Smith, OK City, $150", that kind of thing -- so we assumed this was part of some kind of telethon for a good cause. It turned out that this was Public TV, and the pledges were purely to keep the station running so they could continue to show Are You Being Served every Sunday evening. Pledge $90, and they'll send you an exclusive Mrs Slocombe Mug, with Molly Sugden's signature on it! Afterwards, they showed Keeping Up Appearances.

Before leaving Clinton, we paid a visit to the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum.

It's pretty good, themed by decade, with a walkman handed out to talk you through the exhibits.

It was lunchtime by then, so we tried to find the recommended Jiggs Smokehouse -- which we did, but it was closed.

Instead, we pushed on to Elk City, where we stopped for burritos before going to Elk City's trio of museums; the Old Town Museum, the National Route 66 Museum, and the Farm and Ranch museum. The Route 66 museum was a little on the small side, although it had some nice stuff on show, but the farm museum and the old town museum were damn good. Apart from the cotton, farm implements in Oklahoma weren't much different from Welsh ones in the first half of the century.

I dunno whether it was supposed to be (National Route 66) Museum, or the National (Route 66 Museum) -- but the "Oklahoma Route 66 Museum" in Clinton is a lot more comprehensive.

Elk City is the home of "OK Computer":

On a visit to Elk City in 1996, Oxford angst-rock band Radiohead were so impressed by this computer supplier that they decided to name an album after it.

We drove on and accidentally found ourselves in Texas. That's what happens when you follow that old road surface for long enough.

Suddenly the soil was no longer bright red as it is in Oklahoma... and honestly, the spaces in Texas, even here only a few miles west of the border, are bigger and wider than anything I've seen before.

All our books told us to stop at the U Drop Cafe  in Shamrock for a coffee, but we found it closed, and it didn't look like it had been open for a while either.

It makes a nice picture though...

We considered stopping in Shamrock, but it was neither pretty nor lively, so we pressed on and we're now in the Cactus Inn motel in McLean, Texas.

Part of the appeal of McLean was the promise of great food at the Red River Steak House. The motel owner confirmed that its a great restaurant, but also that it is closed on Mondays. This may be the case for Jiggs Smokehouse and the U Drop Inn for all I know. We had to make do with a takeaway from the service station down the road instead.

prev | index | next