Whirlwind Tour–Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky–Spring 2012

Given the severe tornadic activity in the past few years, we were just a little jumpy at the idea of crossing Tornado Alley so we put our heads down, pointed the coach due east and got across the plains as quickly as leisurely touring would allow.  Except that we kept inadvertently using the Interstate to just to get around town, our stay in Clinton, Oklahoma was uneventful.  Clinton is home to the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum (the National Route 66 Museum is back up the road in Elk City) and we were fortunate enough to pay a visit on a lazy Sunday afternoon when admission fees were being discounted.  The museum is a little short on artifacts but long on story boards and blow-ups of photos from the heyday of The Mother Road.  The parking lot was filled with motorcycles, all ridden by folks speaking a foreign language; German, perhaps, or Dutch.  We surmise they were doing a grand tour of the historic road, living out their Jack Kerouac fantasies.  Our visit to this museum reminded us we should make a point of watching “ The Grapes of Wrath” the next time it’s on TCM.

Only rarely do we do one-nighters but decided to stop in Checotah, Oklahoma for just a little shut-eye before leaping into Arkansas heading to Conway. We took comfort in the fact that our site was within an easy dash to the tornado shelter, a half round metal thing with murals painted on the side.  It didn’t look all that substantial.

This was our second visit to Conway, a sizeable city which describes itself as being between Toad Suck and Pickles Gap.  And it is.  We had reservations at the Corps of Engineers campground at Toad Suck Ferry, a pleasant spot on the river.  The riverfront site we were assigned was nowhere near level and so we opted to move inland.  The park is used heavily by Conway school children on outings and so most mornings we were greeted by noisy groups of kiddies at play.  Fishing is also very big in this neighborhood and many of our neighbors were towing boats, not cars. 

While we were still in Amarillo we began to notice big ol’ moths zooming through the coach at night, bumping into things and making pests of themselves.  It was learned that they are called millers and that this was a big year in their cycle.  We were still pursuing them all across Arkansas and may finally be rid of them.  They can leave a welt if they hit you head on.

Except for the cocktail lounge at the Peabody Hotel, there is not much I like about Memphis, so it was no hardship to just stay on the Arkansas side of the river in West Memphis, get some chores done, do a bit of grocery shopping and hunker down to wait out a terrific downpour.            We were camped at Tom Sawyer, a campground which is smack on the Mississippi River and could see (and hear) the tugs moving the barges up and down the river.  The big diesel engines are felt more than heard and quite often the thrumming was enough to wake a body from a sound sleep.  This location is almost enough to make a person want to re-read Mark Twain.

The storm passed during the night and we had only overcast skies left for our drive to Paducah, Kentucky.  Given my aversion to bridges, it came as a rude shock that I’d plotted our course to take us over not one but two two-lane bridges, the first across the Mississippi and moments later one across the Ohio.  These are not shiny new bridges.  The lanes seem barely wide enough for cars to pass safely going in opposite directions so it was nerve-wracking to meet a procession of on-coming semis.  It seemed like a minor miracle that we didn’t clip any mirrors.

The main reason we headed to Paducah was to get off the road for Memorial Day.  We’ve visited the city before and had toured most of the major attractions.  The owner of the campground supplied us with so much information about what to see and do that we really didn’t need to go to the Welcome Center at all.  But we did because it is housed in a really gorgeous 1860s mansion.

The campground also provided us with free passes to the William Clark Market House Museum; we had toured the museum on our first visit to Paducah and without those passes probably wouldn’t have gone back for a second look.  And we would have missed out on a wonderful afternoon.  We were the only customers and the curator was able to spend time with us, pointing out various treasures and feeding us snippets of history.  

Following a devastating flood, a wall was constructed to keep the Ohio River from reaching the historic old downtown area.  When confronted with an ugly gray wall, what’s an artistic community to do but decorate the whole shebang with a collection of murals depicting the city’s various claims to fame.  This is the least threatening riverfront you can imagine; it’s proximity to the National Quilt Museum means there’s plenty of grandfatherly fellas wandering around, waiting for their wives to finish touring all the fabric shops that have mushroomed up around the museum.  Most of these men are loaded down like pack mules with bags of notions, pattern books and, of course, yards and yards of fabric.  They look bemused.  And bored.

During our conversation with the curator at the Market House museum we were struck with how much her narrative and personal touch went into making everything come alive.  When we told her we were fans of small-town museums, she urged us to visit Adsmore, located in Princeton, Kentucky. 

So the very next day we got an early (for us) start and headed up the highway toward Princeton, a forty mile drive.  Adsmore was built in 1857 by a local merchant.  But he fell upon hard times and sold the house in 1900 to John and Nancy Smith and their daughter and son-in-law, Robert and Mayme Garrett and their new-born daughter Katharine Garrett.  Ms. Garrett never married and when she died in 1984 the town was surprised to learn she had willed the house and all its contents to the Caldwell County Library District.  Fortunately she also left a sockful of money to refurbish the house and to keep it open as  museum.  This place is an absolute treasure!  Those in charge have found a unique way to show off the enormous stash of furniture, clothing, linens, silver – they stage tableaus where the house is decorated with trappings from whichever event is being highlighted.  We were lucky enough to arrive in time for Selina Smith’s (Mayme’s younger sister) wedding to John Osborne.  The parlor was decorated with wedding flowers, the minister’s Bible and reading glasses were on a table by the mantle and the photographer’s camera was at the ready.  The wedding gifts were on display, along with a mannequin wearing Selena’s beautifully preserved wedding dress.

We’ve toured quite a few historic homes and I don’t recall ever seeing one which showed so little wear and tear.  I was amazed at how fresh and pretty all the linens looked.  I saw only one bed skirt which showed signs of age, having yellowed in spots, and the mother-of-the bride’s dress was clearly in distress.  But everything else, including the most delicate laces, were in wonderful condition.  The table was set for a formal buffet (for 100 guests) and the cut-work cloth and napkins were pristine.  It was probably Katherine who took the time and trouble to preserve everything so well.

The most interesting part of the Adsmore story, however, was Selina’s choice of a groom.  She met John Osborne while they were both touring in Egypt.  He was considerably older, a doctor and the third governor of Wyoming.  Do you remember a baddie from Wyoming’s early history, “Big Nose George” Parrott?  You’ve met him earlier in these pages.  His is a fascinating story and Dr. Osborne was one of the physicians who tried to figure out what soured George on the good life…and who wore shoes made from George’s hide to the ball when Osborne was inaugurated as Governor of Wyoming.  So here’s Selina, a wealthy popular Southern beauty, being married off to a wild-and-wooly Westerner. 

Photographs are not allowed in the house and the website is not overly informative so you’ll have to use your imagination to picture one of the photos on display in the house….it’s a photograph taken in front of the pyramids in Egypt, Selina and her sister Kate and Kate’s husband James are sitting on camels, dressed to the nines in what appears to be heavy winter clothing.  Kate and Jim were supposed to be chaperoning Selina on this trip but apparently weren’t doing a very good job of it.  Because right beside Selina, astride his own camel, sits Dr. Osborne.  The ladies were wearing those enormous wide-brimmed hats, all covered with flowers, looking ever so chic.  The gents had on top hats.  The camels wore goofy grins as camels always do.

So Adsmore gets a big A Plus Plus from us as a must-see if you find yourself in that part of Kentucky known as The Land Between The Lakes…Princeton isn’t between the lakes but it’s very close.

We have one more stop in Kentucky,then it’s on to West Virginia.  Stayed tuned.

Albuquerque to Amarillo–April and May, 2012

Our week-long visit to Albuquerque was pretty much taken up with things electronic.  The computer we purchased in Flagstaff had a couple of “blue screen of death” episodes so we went to Best Buy in Albuquerque and swapped for another.  That meant starting the mind meld process all over again and, once that was accomplished, it was discovered that the new computer was incapable of communicating with the old printer and so yet another trip to the big box electronic store was required.  At least everything seems to be functional and we can get back to the matter at hand – exploring, enjoying, experiencing.

Not being left with much time to revisit some of our favorite Albuquerque sites, we focused on our first visit to Tinkertown Museum located in nearby Sandia Park, New Mexico.   This home-grown museum is what puts the “quirk” in Albuquirky.  A seemingly endless string of rooms, sheds, hallways and open-air displays, this museum is a testimony to one man’s ability to collect, create and carve.  Starting when he was still in junior high, Ross Ward began carving miniatures and assembling them in scenes of circuses and towns.  It’s pretty apparent he never parted with anything!  Howie was delighted to find Esmeralda, a fortune teller he believes he first met when she  worked at an amusement park in Chicago several decades ago.  Old signs, walls made from bottles, license plates – it’s all here, randomly displayed in tribute to one man’s vivid imagination and acquisitiveness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Somehow the jump from Albuquerque to Amarillo seemed just a touch too long so we decided to spend a couple of nights in Tucumcari.  It was quite an experience!  Tucumcari is just off I-40 about half way between the two major cities.  Our RV park, featuring all of necessities in good working order, looked like the set of an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western.  It was right on old Route 66 and was once, we’re guessing, a “motor court”.  There are a lot of towns and cities strung out along historic old Route 66, most of them trading on their relationship to The Mother Road.  Of all those towns we’ve visited, Tucumcari had probably changed the least.  It’s not a ghost town but it is a town filled with ghosts. With a population just over 5,000 there’s room for at least twice as many folks in a town that doesn’t sit on the Interstate but rather sprawls a short distance away.   The buildings are “as is”, not rehabbed to represent the good old days.  Wonderfully detailed murals adorn walls of buildings which are otherwise boarded up.  Old cars and trucks, dating to the early ‘50s are casually parked in lots next to diners and motels.

While in town, we paid a visit to the Tucumcari Historical Museum housed in an old building which has served as everything from a school to a hospital.  It is crammed to the rafters with odds and ends of life on the frontier.  From shards of pottery to antique dolls, this place had it all. And, unlike most museums of its kind, the ubiquitous display of barbed wire was not stapled to a board indoors but actually strung on posts to protect an open-air exhibit of fossils from nearby digs.  The town also boasts a dinosaur museum which is part of Mesalands Community College.  We deemed the entry fee too high for what we might expect to find inside and so we decided to by-pass.  We just wanted to visit the museum, not endow it.

The terrain between Tucumcari and Amarillo leveled out, although we didn’t lose that much in altitude.  It’s not quite as ugly as west Texas but there’s not much in the way of scenery to snag the eye.  And not many towns along the way to break up the boredom so we were happy to arrive in Amarillo and get settled in for a week-long visit.  It was hot and windy when we arrived and remained so for just one day.  Then a cold front blew in (blew being the operative word) and we had several chilly, cloudy days with a buffeting wind that rocked us to sleep at night and kept us bundled up during the day.  On our first full day in town we headed off to the Visitors Center to collect information on what do see and do in the area.  Finding ourselves just across the street from the main library, we hit the Friends of the Library shop to snag a few good books for the road ahead.  It being Monday, some of the city’s attractions were closed but we learned that the zoo was open and that there’s no admission fee on Mondays.  So of course we headed to the zoo.  It’s a little short on displays but they do have a very handsome lion and his harem of two, plus a pair of energetic tigers who were busily prowling around their enclosure.  We’ve learned that big cats sleep something like 22 hours a day so it was nice to see some up and about for a change.

 

Our campground is only a mile or so from one of Amarillo’s most famous attractions, Cadillac Ranch. The landowner, with time on his hands and the use of some heavy equipment, buried ten Caddies nose-first into his pasture, all canted at precisely the same angle.  For a period of time, they remained untouched but now they’ve been “tagged” by any number of graffiti “artists”.  There seems to be an endless stream of people willing to slog across the pasture to view the cars up close and personal, even though the cars can be seen quite well from the Interstate, even at 70 mph. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day it was off to visit the National Quarterhorse Hall of Fame and Museum.  The time-line exhibit was especially interesting, not so much for what was happening in the wonderful world of quarterhorses but for the events that were selected as milestones.  We didn’t know the microwave oven dates that far back (and I’ve yet to figure out how to use mine) and it was fun to see the Xerox 914 listed as a stepping stone to the future.  One of the interactive displays had film clips of various competitions for quarterhorses and I became intrigued with the clip on reining events.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stops done at full gallop give a whole new meaning to the term “power brakes”.  It was well worth watching again….so I did.

Next it was off to the Amarillo Museum of Art on the campus of Amarillo College.  Much of the collection features Asian art, most of which was donated by just two families.  There are also a few Georgia O’Keefe watercolors and  photos by Weston, Stieglitz, Ansell Adams and Dorothea Lange.  Admission is free, which seemed appropriate.

With only one nice day forecast between cloudy and/or rainy ones, we headed out early on Wednesday for the 30+ mile drive to Palo Duro Canyon State Park, the primary reason we routed ourselves through Amarillo.  The canyon is the second largest in the United States (can you imagine Texas having the second largest of anything?), being 120 miles long and 800 feet deep.  It was carved by the insignificant sounding Prairie Dog Town Fork of the more famous Red River.  Palo Duro boasts an array of colorful rock layers, from bright red and white to yellow and gray, and has significantly more vegetation than the Grand Canyon so there’s an over-lay of bright green to compliment the earth tones.  There are plenty of hiking, biking and riding trails in the park along with camping areas and cabin rentals but not much in the way of paved roads.  There’s a two-mile long, 10% grade to get to the canyon floor on a road originally laid by the CCC.  Evidence of their stonework still exists at the El Coronado Lodge.

 

One of the more interesting characters to be linked to Palo Duro is Charles Goodnight who, along with Oliver Loving, trailed cattle from central Texas north into Colorado.  They were probably the inspiration for the main characters in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.  Goodnight’s  JA Ranch once covered over one million acres. How’s that for elbow room?   After leaving the canyon, we stopped in the city of Canyon to visit the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum on the campus of West Texas A&M University.  While a little overwhelming, this museum is particularly well laid out, with concise story boards and captioning and handsomely presented artifacts.  From prehistoric days to early pioneers through the oil boom days, this museum covers it all.  It does make a person a little cranky to see objects from one’s childhood (or, worse, one’s wedding presents) displayed as part of history in a museum, however!  We happily spent several hours combing the three floors of displays and could have stayed longer had we not faced a long drive home.

Weather permitting, we will be leaving Saturday for a hop-skip-jump across Oklahoma.  We weren’t able to get reservations in Elk City  to visit the Roger Miller Museum so we’ll be stopping elsewhere.  We’ll let you know if we see anything interesting along the way.

Hittin' the Road

The following posting was prepared several weeks ago.  We have a perfectly lame alibi – the computer ate our homework!  Are you buying that?  Actually, the laptop was showing signs of a nervous breakdown.  A replacement was purchased but it took some time to get it up and running and to do a mind-meld with the older laptop.  As all this was going on, we were hippity-hopping across Arizona, New Mexico and into the Texas Panhandle.  Unless we get blown away by these extraordinarily fierce winds, we can promise another update in the very near future.

 

As indicated in our last posting, we had extended our stay in Mesa for an additional month in order to wrap up repairs to the RV and to  ourselves.  We continued with various sorts of socializing, plus lawn bowling for Howie and beading for me. Then, having pretty much decided we prefer the Phoenix area over other snowbird migration destinations, we decided to go ahead and make arrangements for next season by purchasing a small house in a retirement community.  That was accomplished in a record-setting hurry.  Now having a base,  we were able to  shovel  a ton of cargo out of the coach and  into the house; we heard an audible sigh of relief from the coach’s rear axle!  And we discovered the Saturn has a back seat after all!

About this same time last year we had a new microwave-convection oven installed in the coach and it has never worked properly so we decided to return to Bullhead City and have it repaired while it was still under warranty.  That little endeavor pretty much wasted two full weeks and when we pulled out we still weren’t sure the thing would work properly.  By then the temperature had climbed into the low 90s and the last thing we wanted to do was test the oven, especially since we only had 30 amp service and couldn’t use both the oven and the A/C.  A few days later, when we’d reached a cooler climate, a batch of muffins turned out more or less the way they’re supposed to so perhaps the oven really is repaired.

 

Our next stop was Williams, a small town which bills itself as The Gateway to the Grand Canyon.  The town is also noted as being the final town on historic Route 66 to be by-passed by the Interstate.  It had been several years since we’d visited the Grand Canyon and we decided it was worth another look so off we went on a lovely sunny day.   We knew there were areas of the park which are beyond  our physical abilities to visit but we were surprised to learn that we could drive east about 25 miles on Desert View Drive and visit…you guessed it…Desert View.  That is also known as the East Entrance and is accessible from Flagstaff.

 

The Grand Canyon has five distinct ecological “communities”.  The most common seems to be a forest of dwarf pinion and junipers which occupy the mid level.  Some areas are desert and of course a riparian district inhabits the river’s bank.  There are some stands of Ponderosa pine which thrive on the South Rim.  The North Rim, being at a higher elevation, receives more moisture and supports a wider range of montane flora.  The area supports a wide diversity of plants, animals and birds, including the newly introduced California condors.

After being pulled back from the brink of extinction, the condors were released into the park and seem to be doing very nicely.  We had views of several pairs as they made good use of the thermals over the canyon.

 

 

 

Desert View boasts an observation tower, made of stone, where one can climb to the top for an even grander view of the Grand Canyon.  No extra charge for a view of the Painted Desert off in the distance to the east.  The canyon is narrower at this end, a mere 8 miles to the North Rim as the crow flies and is a busy thoroughfare for migrating birds.

 

We also stopped at the Tusayan Museum and partook of a ranger-led stroll to the ruins.  There, framed between the trees, was a view of the San Francisco Peaks still wearing their snow caps.  Mount Humphrey is the tallest peak in Arizona, topping out at slightly over 12,000 feet.

 

 

Flagstaff is an interesting city to explore.  The historic downtown stretches out along Old Route 66 and many of the old buildings are now restaurants and boutiques.  And, being a college town, there’s always interesting wardrobes to observe.  I’m not sure the short-shorts and tank-top look with knee socks and fur-lined Ugg boots will catch on.  But odder things have happened.  In a relatively short time we were able to get a number of chores done, including the purchase of a new computer.  This one is having fainting spells and it is making us nervous.  So the trip to Flag was most useful.

Now we’re on our way to Albuquerque and points east.