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.