The great 2016 road trip, part 2

[petrea_mitchell]

Day 3: From Farmington, NM, we continued east on US 64 then south on US 550 to I-25 to Albuquerque, where we took that left turn onto I-40. My main impression of Albuquerque was overall brownness. Not just the buildings, but even the concrete structure of the freeway was tinted brown.

Just before the Texas border, we stopped at our first point of interest, Russell's Travel Center. Looking over the route in detail at some point, I'd found a listing for a travel stop that included a car museum, and the SO is always ready to stop at a car museum.

The museum consists of 50 or 60 classic cars all crammed into one very large room, with '50s and '60s memorabilia packed onto the walls. Nothing super-rare, but the SO was suitably impressed.

We followed I-40 to Amarillo, where I got to see the house that the SO used to spend a couple weeks of the summer visiting as a kid, owing to having a grandmother living there.

We turned south on I-27 down to Lubbock, and then into a labyrinth of state and county roads south of that. We stopped for the night about at Lamesa.

Day 4: Continuing south into Midland, we stopped at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum. As the name says, this is a museum devoted to geology in general and the local oil industry in particular. Well, half of it is. The other half houses the car collection of the oil tycoon who built it. So cars for the SO, geology for me, we had to visit it sometime.

The rest of the day we spent on I-20, heading past Dallas-Fort Worth, into the east Texas hill country, across Louisiana, stopping at Vicksburg.

I remember when checking in at that night's hotel, I was standing behind a group of four guys who had arrived on motorcycles, dressed like classic biker dudes down to the leather jackets and everything. While one of them did the paperwork, the other three were conversing among themselves in German.

Next time: War! (memorials)

Comments

[delosharriman]

From what I recall of road trips in my youth, one of the major stopping places out in West Texas is a place called Big Spring, where the water is so abominably foul that the Pizza Hut apologized for serving us with tap water instead of bottled.

You would have passed within a mile of me on Day 4, assuming I was at home. Early this year, I happened to be eastbound on 20 when I noticed a semi with an unusual load. By careful maneouvering in traffic, I managed to confirm my initial impression, from the odd appearance of the stainless-steel cylindrical containers chained down athwart the flat bed of the trailer, that it must be bound from Eunice, New Mexico, to either Wilmington NC or Columbia SC. The inconspicuous placards stating Fissile Material Enriched Uranium Hexafluoride were pretty definitive.

[csadn]

I waved as we drove past.... :)

[csadn]

Driver's Notes: Russell's was the one point of the trip were I was Genuinely Surprised. Usually when a place says "free museum", it's a back hallway with some random stuff in it. At Russell's, the entrance to the Museum *is* the hallway of random stuff. So when Your Obedient Servant And Humble Narrator walked into the Museum itself, a line from "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Hardware Store" sprang from me: "[large exhale] Would you look at all that stuff...."

I have always wanted a replica Chaparral 2E or 2F -- I have learned, sadly, I do not fit into a 2E (at least, not without some epic seat modifications). [sigh] Another dream bites the dust.