Catching up

My vacation started this week.  I traveled to Texas to visit family.  Driving always gives me time to think.  My big discovery on this drive was that I have become one of the old people in hotels.  You know the old people that are up in the room next door, taking a shower while you are trying to sleep in?

Well, I was wide awake,taking a shower, and watching Sportscenter at 3:30 in the morning.  Luckily the rooms on each side of me were filled with high school age kids that were celebrating graduation.  Teens could sleep through Armageddon, so I didn't disturb anyone when I left at 4 to finally get my photos of the Cadillac ranch.  

 

 

Especially in the dark, the Cadillacs are barely recognizeable as Cadillacs.  The grafitti is the only interesting feature left.  It does make photography for a challenge, when they are for a family audience.  The ranch was originally in a site a couple of miles further east.  They were buried at an angle matching that of the great pyramids in Egypt.  The cars look like they were hurriedly re-planted in their new location, with no regard for what they originally were intended to represent.

Like so much in our me-first society, they are now just a venue the new Me generation to deface.  Maybe I am getting old.  Just another episode of old-timer's syndrome.

Grandpa Doode's Last Vacation, Sam Bass, and Swimming Pigs

When I was about 12, we took a family trip to Padre Island and Corpus Christi.  My mom, dad, two sisters, Grandpa Doode, Grandma Lucille, and me all piled into one vehicle and took the trip from north Texas down to the coast.  I'm not sure what vehicle we took, those were the pre-minivan days.  For that many of us, we must have taken Dad's old International Harvester Scout.  I do remember a trip that LeAnne and I fought over who got to ride in the cargo area of the Scout.  So that must've been the trip.  I can't imagine any other vehicle where the seven of us and our luggage would have been able to travel the 400+ miles.  The cramped conditions are probably what prompted Grandma to inform us that this would probably be Grandpa's "last vacation."  The statement and her certainty about it shocked all of us, including Grandpa! 

We drove through Austin and saw the Capitol building.  I was impressed because it looked just like the pictures in the textbooks.  If my memory is accurate, we drove through on a weekend, so there were no tours.  And I definitely remember that it was a very seedy looking neighborhood.  I expected to see Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch on the street corner.  That may have been the real reason we didn't park and take a tour.

It's been a week without a football story, so here's one.  The son of Huggy Bear plays running back for the Oakland Raiders, or at least he did.  I think he may have been released after this past season.  He played on the national champion USC team that beat Texas in the Rose Bowl.  Oh wait, the LONGHORNS won that game!  It must have been another year that he played.

From Austin, we went south to San Marcos and Aquarena Springs, a small amusement park built around the San Marcos river.  The river is spring-fed and was perfectly clear.  We took a glass bottom boat tour and heard about the giant catfish that used to live in the park.  He escaped during a spring with heavy rain and was next seen on the front page of the local newspaper, the victim/trophy of a local trotline fisherman.  Sometimes the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence.  The real highlight of the park was Ralph, the swimming pig.  The audience sat in bleachers and watched Ralph dive and swim with his human friends.  The bleachers were at and below the level of the water and behind a plexiglass wall, so you could see Ralph's little pig legs paddling like mad when he hit the water!  Cathy and I lived in San Marcos in the early 1990's.  When we visited Aquarena Springs, there was no Ralph.  Since the park was being run by the University, Ralph was probably retired due to political correctness.  He has used his retirement years to learn computer skills.  He now has his own Facebook page.  I bet Grandma Lucille never dreamed she would see the day when a swimming pig had his own page on the internet!

A little further south in San Antonio, we visited the Alamo.  It's hard to imagine the scene of the battle right in the middle of downtown in one of the ten largest cities in the country.  The Alamo compound was a church, not a fort, so other than the famous arched church front, none of the site looks like you would imagine.  When the city was repairing the streets downtown in the 90's, they did a lot of archeological studies, looking for the Alamo's well and of course the required lost treasure that always goes with such legendary sites.  I learned that the site of the actual final battle at the Alamo was at Wendy's, a couple of blocks from the shrine.  Some myths should not be burst.  One of my most vivid memories is of the old Buckhorn Saloon down the street from the Alamo.  It is an old west type saloon filled with mounted big game trophies from all over the world and a huuuge collection of antlers.  

Our San Antonio visit was only a few years after the World's Fair was held in the city.  The HemisFair tower was a reasonably new attraction in the city that we had to experience.  An elevator ride to the top of the tower took us to the rotating platform where you could see the entire city and look down on the Alamo.  My youngest sister, Lori, stepped between the warning signs and dropped a bobby pin over the edge to watch it fall.  Mom lectured us all on the dangers of dropping something as small as a dime from such a height.  She could've dropped that hair pin on Grandma Lucille (she and Grandpa Doode didn't go to the top, Grandma doesn't like heights).

I don't remember much about Corpus Christi or Padre Island.  I have never been much of a beach person.  It's hot, humid, the sand never feels as good on your feet as you think it will, and it smells like dead fish.  So, no, I'm not impressed, although years later, I did like the Oregon coast with its redwood tree driftwood.  No redwoods in Texas,so the only thing I remember liking was the fried fish at the little shack on stilts right on the beach.  And I was probably more impressed with the shack on stilts than I was with the fish!


The part of the trip everyone remembers most was the drive between San Antonio and Corpus.  Lori was maybe three at the time, and she had had enough fun for the day.  She started a hundred mile tantrum and for such a little girl, she could wail. 
Finally we reached a point where even Grandma Lucille had run out of patience (I think Grandpa Doode had turned off his hearing aid).  Dad pulled over and Lori and Mom went for a "walk."  Mom's walks didn't involve much walking and definitely didn't leave you in a mood for sitting afterward, if you get my drift.  As an aside, never trust her when she asks if you want to go see the horses during a church service either.  Lori came back much subdued and we actually enjoyed a little peace at the end of the drive.  As we neared the end of the trip, Mom said, "well that whooping seemed to have done a little good."  Lori said, "yeah, but I might still need another one later."

 On the return trip, we went to Longhorn Caverns near Burnet.  It is not a large cavern, but it was a fun trip.  The guide told stories about the Comanches using the cavern as a hideout when the Texas Rangers were chasing them.  It was also a speakeasy during Prohibition, complete with dance floor and chandeliers hanging next to the stalactites.  The guide informed us that it was also a hideout used by the infamous murderer, stagecoach robber, and gunfighter, Sam Bass.  Grandma Lucille was embarrassed, but still needed to tell us that Bass was a distant relative to her side of the family.  She did not hesitate to tell us of the relation, probably because if she didn't Grandpa would.  And he would say it loud enough that someone else might hear.  Then she would really be embarrassed.  She would never understand the modern need of people to air their dirty laundry on national television.  

It seems like we did a lot on this trip.  It might also have been the trip that we spent a day with Grandma's sister and visited the space center in Houston.  Lilly worked for Texas Instruments and they had just come out with the portable calculator.  Portable for the 1970's, it was sized somewhere between a Blackberry and a netbook, only about twice as thick as either.  Lilly's husband showed us a trick with a riddle whose answer was ShellOil.  When you did the math on the calculator, the answer was 71077345.  Turn the calculator upside down and the red LED numbers spelled ShELLOiL.  Primitive nerd humor.  Being kids, LeAnne and I soon figured out that if you left off the S and the oil, you could spell hell on the calculator.  We probably spent an hour giggling over that, all the time watching to make sure Mom didn't catch us.  We were definitely the rebels!

Quite an eventful trip for Grandpa Doode's last vacation.  Well last if you don't count those trips to Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and South Dakota and stops in between.  Even Lori survived to take a couple of more vacations.  

Roadside Attractions, or Don't Lose Your Head

I mentioned Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire in a post last week.  Another of his themes is that air travel has made us less appreciative of our country and landscape.  To really see and appreciate our country, you have to walk it.  Or bicycle it, or at least drive it.  And preferably not on the interstate.  Flying is like time travel.  You start in one location and wake up in a new one.  There is no sense of "getting there."

I love to drive.  A lot of the fun is seeing unexpected landscape or landmarks.  The first driving vacation I remember taking as a family was a trip to Florida in 1976.  One of the highlights was getting lost in Mississippi.  I can't remember what we left the highway to look for. We ended up on a road lined with trees draped with Spanish moss, just like you see in the movies.  Finally we came to an old burned-out plantation house close to the river.  If my memory is correct, all that was left was the huge front porch with vine-covered pillars.  I thought that while writing this I would remember the name of the old mansion, but I'm drawing a blank.  We did take a great picture of Mom and Dad's brand new all black Chevrolet Impala parked in front of the columns.  Typical of kids, I enjoyed that part of the trip more than the two days in Disney World.  

Lori, of course, was only interested in the Motel 6 swimming pools.  She discovered diving boards on that trip.  She would jump off the diving board with the inflatable ring around her waist (she was not yet 5, I think).  On one dive, she hit the water and the ring stayed on top and she went under.  Being the responsible big brother, I had to go under and get her.  Mom and Dad didn't seem too concerned, but they did make a quick trip to the closest K-Mart for some floaties that fit around her arms.

When I was in college, I took my first road trip where I was in charge.  I talked a Vietnamese friend, predictably nicknamed Charlie, into skipping his usual Padre Island trip and going with me on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon.  We learned that March is prime snow season in northern New Mexico and northern Arizona.  It did make it easy to find campsites though.  For some reason, we were the only tent campers at each stop.  The drive along I-40 traces the old Route 66 most of the way from Amarillo to Flagstaff.  My first roadside surprise was the Cadillac Ranch.  I knew about it, mostly from the Bruce Springsteen song, but had never seen it.  I searched for a digital photo for this post, but apparently I have only old 35mm prints.  Guess I'll have to make a little side trip next time I go to Texas.  New Mexico was a little boring, except for the blizzard we were driving through.  Then we got to Arizona.

From the moment we crossed the state line and stopped at the rest area beside Chief Yellow Horse's roadside souvenir stand, I was hooked.  Chief Yellow Horse had a big long yellow 1970 Cadillac complete with longhorns on the hood parked out front.  Teepees lined the parking lot and a live buffalo was penned up beside the front door.  Even though I knew that bison and teepees belonged on the plains, not the desert, it was just about the coolest tourist trap I had ever seen.  Well, if you don't count the rattlesnake pit we saw near El Paso on a trip to Juarez when I was really young.


A few years ago, I drove alone from Arlington, Tx to Yellowstone for a quiet 10 day camping vacation.  Most of the drive from Amarillo to the Grand Tetons was boooooooring.  At one point, just outside of Laramie, I could see a shape in the median, probably a mile ahead.  That part of Wyoming is just as flat as the area around Amarillo.  As I got closer, I could start to make out a familiar face.  But it was a face that as far as I could remember had absolutely no connection to Wyoming.  As I got closer, the features became clearer and sure enough, it was a huge statue, or since it was just shoulders up maybe it is technically a bust?  Of Abraham Lincoln.  I had to stop to see what Honest Abe was doing in Wyoming.  The plaque gave absolutely no clue why the statue was there.  It wasn't until I got back home and did some internet research (thank you Al Gore) and learned about the Lincoln Highway.  The Lincoln Highway was the first coast to coast highway in the U.S.  Just as I-40 has stolen the traffic from Route 66, I-80 has taken over the old Lincoln Highway.  I haven't been that far north again, but the Lincoln highway would be a fun exploration.

Other trips have revealed the Wigwam Motel, which I wrote about and posted some photographs this past summer.  I have also seen a castle on a hillside near Abilene, Tx; a five pound apple pie in southern Arizona; the corner in Winslow, Arizona made famous by The Eagles; giant feet with the poem Ozmandias ("look on my works and despair") between Amarillo and Lubbock; the Big Texan where you can get a free 72 oz. steak if you can eat it within an hour, along with a baked potato and salad; the huge cross near Shamrock, Tx; numerous cliff dwellings in Colorado and Arizona; and lots of other cool stuff.

We recently started driving highway 87 between Raton and Clayton, New Mexico, easily the longest and most boring part of our trip from the mountains in Colorado to my hometown of Graham.  On one of the trips, I noticed banners with photographs of Black Jack Ketchum on every corner in Clayton.  I love old west history, but had never heard of Black Jack Ketchum.  Again, with proper homage to Al Gore (is it getting cooler, or is it just me?), I did internet searches to see who he was.  He was a train robber in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the late 1880's.  Not exactly as prolific or well know as Jesse James or Butch and Sundance though.  He found a location that he liked just outside of Clayton and robbed the train there three times.  Well, the third time was definitely not a charm.  He got caught.  In the process of being captured, he was shot  in the arm.  Since he was caught in the act, the outcome of his trial was a foregone conclusion.  As soon as he was brought into town, the local hangman weighed him and took all the necessary measurements needed to insure a proper hanging.  Predictably, he was convicted and sentenced to hang for his crime.  Unfortunately, his arm wound got serious, and his arm had to be amputated.  Civilized folks don't hang an unhealthy man.  So he stayed in jail and was very well fed until he got healthy enough to kill.  Well, when hanging time arrived, the hangman did not take new measurements.  Black Jack was now quite a bit heavier and leaned a little more to the left than he used to.  So when the trapdoor opened, Black Jack Ketchum dropped, the rope tightened and his head popped right off his neck and flew into the air!  On my trip last spring, my father in law and I stopped in the Clayton Dairy Queen for lunch.  While getting my self-serve Dr. Pepper at the fountain, I looked at the old photographs decorating the wall.  And right there above the cup lids and straws is a reprint of the photograph of the body of Black Jack Ketchum next to the sheriff who is holding the hooded head of the train robber.  I will definitely not be robbing any trains near Clayton, New Mexico!

Oh yeah, I remembered the Mississippi ruins!  Windsor Castle near Alcorn State University - now I even remember going past the University on our drive.