Our View From The Road

In the canyon we were sheltered from the sun’s earliest rays and the morning was brisk. We completed our morning routine, vacated our campsite and dumped the tanks (no mess on me).

Our route took us North into Amarillo where we again joined I-40West towards New Mexico. We soon passed the ‘Cadillac Ranch’ where we had stopped last year. The winds were light being early and there were many people adding to the spray paint on the cars embedded in the field.

We stopped again in Adrian, TX to visit the Midpoint Café and enjoy an early lunch. A 50’s style roadside café, they serve the BEST homemade hamburgers we’ve ever tasted.

As we leave Adrian, the landscape begins to change rapidly towards open rangeland. There are very few trees and endless expanses of grasslands.

We head towards New Mexico but stop just before entering at a small mostly vacated town called Glenrio, NM. It technically just across the state line and has 1 visibly operating business, a cannabis shop (now legal in NM).

We didn’t stop for that however, we stopped to look at a now abandoned Post Office and Cafe. Ghosts of a simpler time along old Route 66.

As we head across New Mexico’s barren landscape the temperatures rise and hit 29C by early afternoon. The A/C is deployed. The pictures below don’t do the vastness of the spaces justice and at times you really wonder if you’ll reach to ridge on the distance and what could be beyond? Yep, more trains, plains & automobiles.

Below is a collection of pictures from the day. The sixth picture is of a mountain that we felt reminded us of ‘Jabba-the-Hutt’ from Star Wars. Yep, it was a long day in the sun.

We stopped in Grants, NM at the KOA Journey as a place to rest for the evening. To remind us that we are now at a higher elevation, the chip bag has puffed up due to the lower air pressure. Must remember to be careful opening other containers! (ask me how I know!)

Tomorrow we head into Arizona and make a few more Route 66 stops.

It rained last night. Not a light Spring shower, nope, a Midwest rolling, windy, thunderstorm. Welcome to Oklahoma folks. The wind jostled the van and woke us both several times throughout the night, but by the morning a light shower was all that remained. The rain was supposed to last the day in El Reno, luckily we were heading West into Texas and would drive out of the rain mid morning.

We were on the road by around 10:00am, enough time for a relaxing breakfast as we watched others depart.

Out on the highway the spray from passing vehicles was bad but as stated above, the rain wrapped up mid-morning and the sun started to appear through the breaks in the clouds showing us the magnificence of the plains.

The temperature climbed into the low 20’s as we headed further West and we found ourselves turning down the heat closer and closer to the point of turning on the A/C. We didn’t, but it was close. The sun blaring in the windows on the South-side of the van really warmed the vehicle.

Nearing the Texas border we took a short detour off of I-40 and onto the historic Route 66 through the towns of Erick, OK and Texola, OK. Erick is still fairly well populated, as a small town but we couldn’t see much in the way of an active commercial district, just many boarded-up buildings.

Texola however is practically a ghost-town. Wikipedia lists the town as having 42 residents in 2022, we saw none of them.

We stopped in Texola as Barb had read that an old one-room jailhouse still survived from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. We found it on a back street made of concrete blocks and a concrete roof. It’s as unspectacular as the town, but here it is with some other pictures. The list of names is evidently the school graduating class list from 1938; however, no sign of a schoolhouse remains and one wonders why it was engraved in stone and now stands besides the jail.

Returning to the I-40 we soon entered Texas and stopped in a rest stop to have lunch in the van.

Arriving in Amarillo we took the ring road around the South of the city to Canyon, TX to top off with fuel and groceries before heading to Palo Duro State Park where we will be camping for the next two nights. We had visited last year and did some hiking but this year have been able to successfully snag a couple of sites courtesy of the Milddogs and their Campnab subscription.

Our first night is in the Mesquite campground at the Southern-most end of the canyon. The site (#090) is perfect. Quiet with amazing views (see below) and level-enough that we don’t need to add blocks to level the van.

We enjoyed a quiet afternoon relaxing in the hammocks and made a Texas steak dinner before watching the sunset and the stars appear overhead. We’re both looking forward to a quiet day tomorrow before moving to a second campsite within the park.

‘night Y’all.