Henry was such an energetic scribe/wingman that I get to pass the mic to him for most of this update. 😌 Here’s how he recorded things in our journal (Hen text indented throughout, mine regular):
After Cadillacs we ate an excellent lunch of fried chicken and gravy. While we were there, someone began the challenge of eating the famous 72oz. steak in an hour.
After that we went to the Amarillo Train Museum, which had a model railroad and lots of equipment from the nuclear weapons disassembly plant’s train (three guard cars, electric buffer cars, a car to carry bombs, and a helium car).
You know who’d love to take you on a narrated 15-minute tour inside, outside, and on top of those trains? Why Henry Nack, of course. Take ‘er away, Hen:
In Amarillo we saw a Santa Fe steam engine—the prototype #5000—and five BNSF locos in H1 paint schemes.
After finally getting our fill of the museum & city, we headed west once again, hoping to grab lunch at the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, TX (population 166). Well, good news/bad news: it’s hard to find a living soul there, much less an open restaurant, but the antique ruins are fun to explore:
Hen writes,
We were trying to find the Midpoint Cafe, but instead we found an abandoned Phillips 66 station with an old Coke machine, vintage gas pumps and signs, and most importantly, a very cool Texas farm route sign, which is in the Miata as I write!
All was well until we grabbed that sign. As we were somehow finagling it into the Miata, an ominous white pickup truck started running slow laps on the road in front of the service station—and the afternoon took a turn I can only describe as “Murder-y.”
We hightailed it out of there as fast as the old car would carry us, and I swear for the next hour on the freeway, I kept nervously checking the rear view mirror, honestly expecting a Mad Max-style pickup truck full of hooting, pipe-wielding yokels to speed up on us. 😬 Thankfully that never happened, of course—and Hen and I had a good chat about following one’s gut and not taking things without permission, even if they seem long abandoned.
So, moving right on…
While going to Tucumcari, NM, we were in the endless fields of wind turbines. We found an enormous pile of their blades!
When we arrived, I started to notice all the abandoned gas stations, motels, etc. on Route 66 (acting as the Main Street). But, I also noticed all the cool historical motels and gas stations. We stopped at Teepee Curios and got some cool stuff.
We took the clerk’s advice to eat at a restaurant down the street, which had a fake cow on the sign. In Tucumcari I noticed the sign for the Blue Swallow Motel. You may ask why this is so special, and it is because I saw the sign on one of my many postcards. While leaving we saw another scene from one of my postcards.
And with that, we settled into our final 3-hour (!) drive of the day:
We saw several trains and many mesas. We also saw a huge truck wreck on the median, where there was merchandise thrown everywhere & one of the trailers was mangled. While writing this I had my head down, and dad joked that I was a prairie dog, and I was gonna be served up as “chicken”!
Happily, Hen was not served up as chicken. 😌