It rained all the way from Albuquerque to Wichita Falls.
I spent one very stormy night in Amarillo in a Walmart parking lot and this was the view out my window as the rain, pelting the roof, lulled me to sleep.
The city of Amarillo has a thing for '60s automobiles....
The Cadillac Ranch was created in 1974 by a group of Texans with way too much money....
And a questionable taste for art.
Visitors to this cow pasture bring along cans of spray paint and fulfill some inner primitive desire to mark their territory.
I guess we have evolved beyond the stage of peeing along our boundaries...
But just barely.
Yes, sister, Mary and I stopped here two years ago when my journey was just beginning and I posted about it then.
We were sad about the paint cans left behind throughout the field...
Maybe it might be better if we went back to peeing.
Many of the small towns I drove through in the panhandle were very nearly ghost towns. It is so very sad to see windows boarded up and block after block of dead and dying businesses.
In Mineral Wells I not only found lots of closed up businesses I also spied this old hotel, completely vacant and vandalized. From Aunt Louise I learned that this was once an elegant resort built on the natural hot springs of the area. Why can't we do another land grant of some kind to rejuvenate these towns? "One boarded up building on Main Street in Podunk, Tx can be yours--Free--if you just agree to stay for a while."
Always enjoyed Stanley Marsh's Cadillac Ranch on our drive to Taos.....Loved the towns of Quanah, Childress, Vernon and Decatur....Quanah was the birthplace of one of the first women serial killers, Judy Buenoano..back in the 70's & 80's ...she killed her husband, fiancee...two other boyfriends and perhaps several more...arsenic was her choice.....Also Texas Ranger William Jesse McDonald lived in Quanah, where he engaged in a shootout in 1893 with Childress County Sheriff John P. Matthews. McDonald died in Wichita Falls and was interred at Quanah...the old chief had to smile over that....Happy trails to you Toni....later
ReplyDeletedean
Dean, I love your side stories. It must be your profession that accounts for your interest in the more notorious of an area.
ReplyDeleteArsenic! There is an article in the New Yorker (I hink) about how women ridded themselves of inconvenient people by poisoning them with arsenic. It was foolproof until someone discovered how to detect its residues in cadavars.
ReplyDeleteKind of depressing territory you have been traversing lately. Time for a change of scenery, eh?