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Ian Rambles
We met 'Reece and Betty at breakfast. He had been a
merchant seaman and yachtsman, building their own boat.
Their van, "Inertia", is fitted out like a
small boat with none of the "home comforts"
that the big RV's that we share campsites with contain.
Their table is a piece of hardwood that did the same
duty on one of their boats - Maurice said that it would
be the one thing he would save if the van caught fire.
Fiona's Journal
We had a lovely start to the day today. An excellent
serve yourself breakfast in the motel where you can
cook your own waffles (which come out the shape of Texas)
from a jug of thick batter and a great waffle-maker
machine. You pour a cupfull of batter into a heavy cast-iron
grid, close the cast-iron lid and rotate the whole thing
through 180 degrees with a big handle which turns on
the heat for exactly the right amount of time to cook
it to perfection.
Ian discovered what “biscuits and gravy”
is and liked it.
In the course of this interesting breakfast we met
Maurice and Betty de Verteuil. They are a couple, in
their late seventies or early eighties I suppose, who
describe themselves as “citizens of the world”,
having lived in Europe, Australia, Canada and now America.
They are based in Fort Lauderdale but spend at least
half the year traveling around the USA in their venerable
camper van “Inertia” (named after a belly
dancer Maurice once knew). Betty is English by birth
and Maurice is French but was sent to England from occupied
France as a schoolboy. Anyway they were very interesting
people, we greatly enjoyed their company and exchanged
e-mail addresses.
After our, now habitual, morning swim we hit the road
again. We had to do some Interstate Highway because
the original Route 66 is either buried beneath it or
now falls within private land but about an hour West
of Amarillo we diverted off to look at “Cadillac
Ranch”. This consists of ten battered and rusting
old Cadillacs, planted nose down into the ground in
the middle of otherwise featureless prairie. They are
painted in assorted psychedelic colours and then over-sprayed
with graffiti by its many visitors. We were handed three
cans of spray paint by departing visitors and duly passed
them on as we left. I wrote “we miss Pickle”
on the yellow front wing of one car – it was just
the first thing that came into my head!
Next stop was the tiny hamlet of Adrian which is deemed
to be the mid point of Route 66 and we asked for Ugly
Crust Pie at the Mid-Point Cafe, as advised by one of
our Route 66 guidebook, and it was as delicious as they
said it would be. Shortly after this we got onto some
really good stretches of the old Route 66 road. Texas
really is amazingly flat with vast, distant horizons
– a bit like being at sea actually. As we approached
and then crossed into New Mexico the road and the prairie
started to develop gentle undulations and the dry prairie
grass thinned and disappeared leaving rocky red earth
with scattered wiry shrubs and we began to spot the
first small cacti. Then we started to see distant ridges
and the classic flat-topped mountains or mesas with
wide flat plains between them.
We did an 18 mile dirt road section of Route 66 from
Glenrio to San Jon which was great fun to drive and
we let Arthur have a go at the wheel for part of this
section much to his delight and Harry's dismay!
The temperature outside the car topped 100 degrees
this afternoon with hot winds and fluffy white clouds
in a bright blue sky. The clouds produced really black,
sharply defined shadows on the ground beneath them.We
reached a KOA campsite about 5.00pm Mountain Time (having
crossed another time line at the Texas/New Mexico border
and were lucky enough to get a room above the Campsite
Office for the night.
This KOA is owned and run by Denny and Debbie and
Denny is originally from Yorkshire and has family in
Leeds but you would never know it from his accent! He
left England in the 70's during the period of industrial
unrest, the “winter of discontent” and the
three day week and is a totally converted patriotic
American now. We are in Las Vegas, by the way –
the other Las Vegas!
Arthur's Log:
We came over the peak of just another hill -
and suddenly we were in a barren wasteland. Red canyon
walls in the distance and endless grey-green soil for
miles. Plants were thinly spread, just one to each fifty
square metres. It is really the land of cowboys. Just
the setting for men on horseback and covered wagons.
I drove through the desert in a car with no name.
Eating natchos that all taste the same.
The Harry Report
Most excellent caddy ranch!
George's Musings
Liked this motel - and I learnt to float on my own in
the pool.
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