Other Adventures, July 5 – 6, 2021
Besides courthouses and canyons, we stopped at a few other places on our way to Colorado.
Bowie (BOO-ee), Texas is named after James Bowie, one of the defenders of the Alamo. James Bowie is also known for the Bowie Knife. In 2016 the city’s Chamber of Commerce unveiled the Bowie Knife Monument, which features a 20-foot 6-inch long knife standing on a base. Memorial plaques and pavestones surround the monument. The Bowie Knife Monument is a symbol of civic and Texas pride and demonstrates that a town can build a really big knife if it wants to.
We spent the night of July 5 at the Embassy Suites in downtown Amarillo, Texas. It was a very nice hotel, but the highlight was the guy who makes the custom omelets. Delicious! (The omelets, I mean. We didn’t eat the guy.)
Our first stop from Amarillo was the famous Cadillac Ranch. If you’ve been living under a rock or are new to Earth, the Cadillac Ranch is a display of vintage Cadillac sedans that are partly buried, nose-first, in a cow pasture. I won’t go into the details of the installation, but Wikipedia has a good article on the Cadillac Ranch.
The best part of our visit was a sweet older couple that we met, Tom and Mary. They are from the San Francisco Bay Area in California and travel the U.S. extensively. Mary grew up working in the fields as the child of migrant farm workers and dreaming of visiting Hawaii. She’s been there twice now! They were in Texas to see their first great grandchild. They held hands the entire time we spoke to them. I hope that Kristi and I get to travel like they have. We’ve already got the hand-holding part down.
This is not the original location of the installation. It was moved further out of town a number of years ago. The Cadillac Ranch shows that if you bury a bunch of cars halfway into the ground that people will come to visit and paint them.
From the Cadillac Ranch we drove up through the Texas Panhandle via U.S. 385 (through Channing), and joined U.S. 87 in Hartley. From there we proceeded through Dalhart and then northwest to the town of Texline, where I ate the worst fajitas I’ve ever had. Seriously. It was like they mistook Steak-umms for fajita meat.
Texline is right next to the Texas-New Mexico border. This was my first time in New Mexico, and I was not disappointed. The weather was pretty bad from time-to-time, with bands of thunderstorms passing through ahead of a weak cool front. But the vistas were amazing. This had been a wet summer and everything was green.
We stopped at the Capulin Volcano National Monument, just outside of the town of Capulin, New Mexico. The Capulin Volcano is extinct, but last erupted as recently (geologically speaking) as around 60,000 years ago. The park includes a road that spirals around the mountain up to the top. Hiking trails lead from there down into the crater. Due to the approaching thunderstorms, though, we decided it was wisest to skip the drive up the mountainside.
We stopped at the Capulin Country Store, which is a nice little gift shop in town, and bought several large pieces of pumice to use as decoration in the yard.
From there we continued on our journey, turning north onto I-25 at Raton, New Mexico. We drove through the Raton Pass into Colorado, where we proceeded to our initial destination, the city of Colorado Springs.
Initial destination? Well, that is another story…