Amarillo, Texas to Santa Rosa, New Mexico
- Today's photographs in no way capture what we've seen. The place just doesn't fit into a camera
- As copyright holder on this document, I forbid anyone employed by, or affiliated in any way with, National Car Rentals, from reading on, for reasons which will soon become apparent.
We had a quick Wendy's burger for lunch, planning to have a decent evening meal. We're trying to experiment with as many burger joints as possible. Wendy's in London does a pretty superior burger: almost like real food -- Wendy's in Amarillo was a greasy, mushy, somewhat tasteless affair, and we weren't too impressed. Taco Bell is the favourite fast food so far, since you ask.
West of Amarillo, we stopped (as everyone does) for Cadillac Ranch. 10 old Cadillacs, buried like standing stones, at the same angle as the great pyramids (it says here).
All the cars are covered in graffiti. Every so often they're all given a fresh covering of paint, so the graffiti can start afresh.
From there, we continued West, partly on the old road, partly on the Interstate (where the old road is under it), and reached the end of the High Plains of Texas. Here the flatness begins to falter, and we started driving down some hills. In Adrian, we stopped for a coffee at the Mid Point Cafe, 1139 miles from Chicago, 1139 miles from Los Angeles, on Route 66.
From there on, as we crossed the border into New Mexico, the scenery became so spectacular you could weep. As I said, the photographs don't do it justice. This is the Llano Esracado, the Staked Plains. It's so homogenous that early settlers would drive stakes into the ground to mark the way.
Just to put things into perspective, our road atlas says:
New Mexico:That's a lot of empty space (although the atlas does not record the number of cattle. We saw quite a few.)
Land Area: 121,364 sq. mile - 5th largest state
Population: 1,738,700
We stopped at the K-Mart in Tucumcari. There have been billboards suggesting we sleep in "Tucumcari Tonite" since Missouri. Before the Interstates came along, the ads used to claim 2000 motel rooms in the town. Our guidebooks say that's dropped to 1500. The ads we saw claim 1200. Certainly, you only have to drive through to see that Tucumcari has a lot of motels, and little else.
The K-Mart is dwarfed dramatically by the nearby Saddleback Mesa, something I've again completely failed to capture in a photograph:
Oi, you from National Car Rentals. Go away now.
Between Cuervo and Santa Rosa, we had a choice between returning to the Interstate, or tackling a neglected part of old Route 66. The Illustrated Guidebook to the Mother Road says "If you don't mind broken pavement and have a high clearance, then this is a side-trip not to be missed". Well, we thought, the car doesn't have a low clearance - it's not like one of these lowrider custom cars... if things look hairy we can always turn back... so we drove blithely past the "road closed" sign. It was fine, just a little grass growing up the middle of the road, like we get on the country tracks in Wales, for the first couple of miles. As we pressed further on, into the wilderness, the grass grew a bit longer, and some sturdier plants started showing up in the middle of the road, and we started to hear some alarming "thuds" as we drove over them. At one point we chickened out at a particularly tough looking weed, and I had to get out and uproot it before we continued. Five miles in, we stopped where the road opened out near a tree, to take in the atmosphere.
Who could have been here, for decades? Someone, it seems, because I found a 1992 quarter. If you lost a quarter 5 miles up a barely navigable closed part of Route 66 in New Mexico, get in touch and I'll return it to you.
I took the opportunity to have a peek underneath the car to see if there was any damage. A piece of metal appeared to be bend out of shape, and had a lot of grass wedged underneath it, but we didn't have much choice but to press onwards -- anyway, everything sounded OK, the engine temperature was fine, and the thing was moving.
After about 9 miles of this, we emerged as expected on a proper paved road, leading into Santa Rosa. We're in the La Mesa motel, at the top of the hill in Santa Rosa. It's hard to imagine now, but Santa Rosa used to get a lot of motel custom from through traffic when cars got snowed in. You didn't get that in Tucumcari, but we're at altitude now.
In the motel carpark (parking lot!) I took a closer look at that bent piece of metal under the car. Guess what, it's bent perfectly symmetrically, and it's pretty obvious that the bends were made in the factory. Phew, we got away with that one.
At about 8:00 I popped out to see how the sunset was coming along -- we had intended to drive West a couple of miles and get a few spectacular sunset pictures. What I found was a dark sky to the West, and distant, spectacular, forked lightning. We stood outside in the warm wind and watched the storm on the horizon for about 15 minutes, and eventually we decided to go and get some dinner. By the time we'd been into the room and got ready, it was raining, and raining hard enough to make driving a struggle. We found Jospeph's Cantina through the sheets of rain, and sat down for a delicous Tex-Mex meal. As we ate, the rain got heavier and heavier, the lightning got closer and brighter, and the thunder got louder. A couple of times the restaurant lost power; much to everyone's excitement. We're back in the motel now, and wondering whether choosing the hilltop motel was such a good idea. I'm typing with the computer running off battery.