Last Route 66 Kicks & Santa Fe

The actual town of Shamrock, TX was our first stop once we got back onto I-40/Route 66.

You may be surprised to find there is a lot of Irish iconography here!

We parked across from this cute restored service station.

Shamrock is famous for its not one, but two Blarney Stones. Encased in this green concrete... thing... is the “real” one, which was cut off of the original in Ireland and shipped over when the officials of Shamrock asked really nicely.  But might this story be a whole heap o’ blarney itself??  Since this one doesn’t have an attendant who sanitizes the rock after every kiss, like the real deal, I opted for an air kiss.

At some point the town felt the need to have a second extra-extra-blarney-y stone made and installed a couple blocks away.

Texas Theaters was once a state-wide chain.  This is the only one that still shows a new movie on a regular basis.

Authentic Irish Tex-Mex

The most popular tourist stop in Shamrock is this gorgeous restored Art Deco Conoco station with an attached coffee shop.  It’s now a gift shop and visitor center.

The cafe section has been display-only for decades, but the lady in the gift shop said they’re planning on making it operational again later this year!

Elvis once stayed at the inn across the street, ate in this cafe, and then had his foot run over by a local kid on a tricycle.

A ways further down Route 66 in McLean, TX, is another old and very tiny service station.

Near Amarillo, we stopped at Cadillac Ranch, a line of old Cadillacs stuck grill-first in the dirt. 

Over time visitors started to tag the cars, and eventually every other man-made surface nearby, with spray paint.

There is now a truck parked to the right of the Cadillacs selling spray paint at marked-up prices, but I picked up the first discarded can I found and it was more than half full!  Time to be a Li’l Punk!

I thought hard about how to best express my torment and angst, but all I could think of was “REBA” 

The paint is so thick it looks like the beginnings of cave formations.

Before we left Texas, we hit up a rest area with a large scenic overlook deck.

That’s a whole lotta Texas!

If this Horse Motel had free HBO I’ll bet it would be a lot busier.

The truck (which runs on diesel) ran out of DEF fluid suddenly and we had to make a couple emergency stops to get more as we crossed into New Mexico.  The second stop took us through Tucumcari, NM, where we passed the popular Blue Swallow Motel.

The truck fully DEF-ed, we drove on to Santa Fe, NM and our site for the night in the Rodeo de Santa Fe Fairgrounds.

RV parking is only available here when there isn’t an event, so there are no bulls, cowboys, and thank god no clowns, but we were greeted by a couple of horses who live on the grounds.

The RV hookups are on the north and south sides of the arena.  Our camper is on the very far left.  Once we were docked, I took a walk around the grounds and found the rodeo mascot.

Our laundry bag was getting full, so we ran out to a local laundromat and just managed to finish before closing.  While the clothes were drying, Dad and I went across the street to pick up dinner from Lotaburger, a local fast food joint that does burgers NM style with green chile sauce.  Good stuff!

I’ll end with a very special edition of Daily Sunset Photo featuring a Beef Jerky truck parked next to an Express Crematorium, taken from the Lotaburger parking lot.  Laundry, body disposal, junk food.  All your basic needs on one block.

 

Overnight on a farm in Shamrock, TX - May 7-8

After our longer-and-weirder-than-expected visit with Harley, we rolled into Texas later than we’d hoped.

“Drive Friendly the Texas Way”

At 6:30 pm we pulled into the second Boondockers spot of our trip - an operating farm surrounded by nothing but sky and grass as far as the eye could see.  It used to produce manure for sale, but now they just raise cattle.  

The skies were growing turbulent as we set up.  At first it looked like it might be moving away from us.

Dad and I went for a quick walk around the grounds and met the two sweet dogs that guard the property.  

This is Jake, he’s the daytime guy.

And this is Panda, the night guardsman.  This picture was taken the next morning when he was sleeping off his long night.  He’s also just gotten a kind of awkward haircut (he’s a Great Pyrenees mix.)

It quickly became apparent that the storm was not going to spare us.  We watched the lightning in the distance for a while before it got too close for comfort and skedaddled back to the camper.

Nothing ominous about this storm cloud in the shape of an angel of death coming straight towards us!

The storm got pretty intense, with shaking wind and  lightning cracking right over us in our little fiberglass box.  It was pretttty cool, although Mom was not a fan.

After the peak of the storm had passed, it was still raining hard, but the sunset came through the clouds for a few eerie minutes.  Here’s a time-lapse I got of it.

We made fancy healthy-person salads to compensate for the afternoon’s assault on our guts.

The bad weather passed in the night with no damage incurred, and the sunrise Saturday morning was all the more beautiful for it.

We spent some more time with Jake and Panda, the best dogs in Texas.

Then we met up with our host, who’d invited us to watch him bottle-feed one of his calves.

Poor little guy’s mom had been found dead in the field of unclear causes. :-( He runs over to get his bottle as soon as anyone comes into view.

Once the bottle is done, if you get your finger, hand, arm, or any other appendage near him, he’ll just keep going at it!

We would’ve loved to have spent more time here, since Mom and Dad both have fond memories of family farms in Kentucky, and I loved those puppers.  But we had a reserved spot in Santa Fe to get to (the last of our advance reservations - from here on we’ll be winging it more) - so west we went!

 

May 7 — I-40 Through Oklahoma

Yesterday was so full that I decided to take a day off from writing AND split it into two posts.  So for a while, these will be a bit behind.

Finally dragged myself out of bed early enough to see the sunrise, and it was a doozy!

Also, the ants that survived our onslaught had moved on to sandier pastures.  Humans:1 Nature:0

Took a 2.5 mile walk around the campground and found an authentic pioneer outpost.

You can barely make them out, but there are at least 8 deer faces poking out of the underbrush, perfectly still, staring straight at me.  It was like a Magic Eye poster.

Some cool signage just outside the campground.

We got back on the road at 11ish and stopped at Walmart #3 in Yukon, OK (hometown of Garth Brooks!) for refueling and fridge restocking.

We arrived in El Reno, OK around 2:30 for a late lunch.

We were a week too late for the Fried Onion Burger Festival, which centers around the cooking (and hopefully eating?) of a 750-lb onion burger, and the Main Street area was quiet but cute.

Oklahoma onion burgers are crisp-fried patties of a little meat and a LOT of shredded onion. Popularized during the Depression, the cook who invented it supposedly smashed a half-onion’s worth of shreds into every five-cent patty.  We of course did our due diligence and decided on Johnnie’s, one of the three diners in El Reno legendary for their onion burger. 

 The burger was great but the onion rings really stole the show.  The Frito Chili pie was a junk food lover’s dream and a bathroom janitor’s nightmare.

A block away, we visited a darling little bakery that does exquisite modern wedding cake designs and a few take-away dessert items.  We got a slice of cheesecake and a PB Brownie to split.  Unsurprisingly, they were pretty danged great.

El Reno is obviously trying to attract more tourism, with Lime scooters everywhere, a hip boutique or two, and public art installations like this cool graffiti alley, but it was nearly empty of people and there were a lot of closed businesses and empty storefronts.  It’s a really sweet little town so I hope that once more tourism starts back up, it’ll find it’s way.

A ways further west, we stopped at the Cherokee Trading Post, which has pretty standard souvenir shop fare, but is notable for being in continuous operation since 1963.  There’s also a giant Native man statue, but you quickly find that Giant Man Statues of all persuasions are a common Route 66/I-40 motif.

Say “tourist!” (They actually are!)

In the trading post parking lot we asked the driver of this truck what he was hauling...

It’s a generator for one of these wind turbines!

As we neared the Texas border, we were cutting it close to “closing hours” of the Sandhills Curiosity Shop in Erick, OK.  We saw this place on Roadside America and due to its legendary/infamous status, Mom & Dad had seen it on a couple documentaries/travel shows.  It’s billed as “a shop where nothing is for sale and its greatest curiosities are its owners, Harley and Annabelle, ‘The Mediocre Music Makers.’” Reviews online from previous visitors from around the world also tout Harley as a laugh riot and one of the last vestiges of authentic Route 66 culture.  Naturally, we were VERY anxious to see this place.  We screeched into a parking spot down the street and speed-walked over.  What luck!  The hours posted on Google were meaningless and Harley was inside playing guitar.  We stepped inside... you know what they say about being careful what you wish for?

Harley is indeed a character.  Sadly, his wife Annabelle passed from cancer in 2014, but her presence and influence on the “shop” is still very tangible.  The elaborate posters she created for visiting tour groups are stacked in huge piles and her paintings and drawings are tucked everywhere.  I can only assume that the collecting was mostly her passion, as well, since Harley seemed fairly dismissive of the “stuff” and if we expressed interest in looking at anything or asking about items, he’d quickly try to distract us with (VERY) off-color humor, good-natured ranting, and performances both oratory and musical which he frankly demanded be filmed.  All while high as a kite and drunk as a skunk.  Tipping is highly encouraged and seems to be how he makes his living.

Almost an hour later, we emerged in somewhat of an exhausted daze.  Mom said it best — “I kept hoping he’d stop acting and just talk to us.”  Harley will make you laugh, but you might not be entirely sure why, or whether your laughter is conciliatory or simply confused.   I’m glad we stopped, and Harley doesn’t owe anyone a piece of his authentic self, but there’s a manic performative-ness and an understandable sadness that has tempered the good-time laid-back vibe that this place seems to once have had. Wait... did we just discover a near-perfect encapsulation of the American Experience?  Or maybe we just caught him on a bad day.  

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Real Talk with Reba.  Don’t forget to submit your nominations for my Pulitzer Prize.

Part two tomorrow - a stay on a working cattle farm in Texas!