Day 3 - The Kitsch of Days Gone By

Continuing on Route 66, we back tracked to the Round Barn.  It was… a round barn.  Didn’t get out of the car.  

Next leg was a hefty 3 hours crossing over into TEXAS.  One thing I will say about this road trip is that having a destination every 30-60 minutes makes the drive go by much faster – even if the thing we are stopping at is ridiculous!  Now, since we’ve already seen a bunch of gas stations, I didn’t think that our next stop – the Art-Deco Conoco service station and diner – was going to be all that exciting – but it was a wonderfully restored old timey gas station

and the best part was the 6-car Tesla charging station on the side of it!  I guess to stay alive you must change with the times.  Damon is been gunning for a Tesla...

This is just a cool picture of our car

Next stop – Phillips 66 Service Station.  Looked like a tiny gingerbread house – but well restored!  So many of these places have vintage cars and trucks in premises to give the 50's / 60's vibe.

Next stop – the Leaning Water Tower of Groom, TX.  It is… a water tower that leans.  I'm not sure why it is the Leaning Tower of Groom when it has Britten painted on the side, but it is what it is.  When I say we stopped at every oddball thing, I was not kidding.

Next stop (the Texas panhandle was a hot spot for the weird) was the Bug Ranch (not to be confused with the Cadillac Ranch, which is yet to come.)

The Bug Ranch is an area that has a few VW Beetles mounted nose first in the dirt and the kitschy part is that people bring spray paint and tag them. 

There are also a few abandoned buildings – a gas station and a hotel.  Both buildings were covered in spray paint and overgrown with weeds.  

The store still had a bunch of stuff in it – counters and displays – all knocked over, broken glass on the floor, chairs, etc.  It is an eerie feeling of fun with the spray paint, but also a little spooky and sad because these are just dilapidated husks of what was formerly there. 

We never could find the Triangle Motel, which I can only assume was a motel in the shape of a triangle.  I’ve noticed that some folks were not all that creative with naming conventions back in the day.  Next – the so much more popular Cadillac Ranch, which I’m guessing is what inspired the Bug Ranch.  The Cadillac Ranch had cars and RVs lined up on the frontage road in both directions with people streaming in - apparently much more popular than the bug ranch.  A short walk from the road  into an open field brought us to the line of Cadillacs planted face first in the dirt with a good crowd of people spray painting them. 

Given the number of discarded spray paint cans in the vicinity (literally hundreds) and the unmistakable odor of paint in the air, and the number of people spraying each car, I’m guessing that any individual tag is only visible for a day or two before it is covered up.  Even though we did not add the Card/Weinberg gang tag to a Cadillac, we did enjoy watching and it was cool to see the colors and creativity.

Us trying to be socially responsible...  

Next stop – the Midpoint Café.  Another head scratcher as to what this was!  Literally the midpoint on Route 66 if you went end to end.  Unfortunately, it was closed due to Covid.  Luckily, there was literally no one remotely close so we could take some fun pictures in the road, which by the way, was like 150-degree asphalt.

Our final Texas stop was the one that started our discussion on Route 66 in general.  More on that in a minute.  The Glenrio Ghost Town is a small stretch of road that crosses over the Texas/New Mexico border – it was strategically placed to take advantage of tax laws and drinking laws that were more advantageous in each state.  Once the interstate was built, literally a stone’s throw away, Glenrio was bypassed completely and it died.  There are a few buildings still standing and the area is preserved as a historic landmark.  But overall kind of creepy.

At the end of the main street in Glenrio, the turnaround point makes for nice target practice, apparently.

So the discussion on Route 66 in general (so far) – we both agree that the drive had to be done and we are so glad we are doing it; however, the towns that thrived when the Mother Road snaked through them are dying or dead and most are in such a state of neglect and disrepair that it is just sad.  We passed an unbelievable number of former gas stations, motels and restaurants that just closed up shop and are boarded up, overrun with weeds and falling apart.  It reminded us so much of being in Cuba where progress just stops but life goes on.  In the case of Cuba, it was the 50’s; in the case of Route 66 – time stands still for so many of these places in the 60’s – the colors, the style, the décor.  We haven’t quite put our finger on the right word that describes what it is like, but it is somewhere between sadly nostalgic and kind of sad in general.

Moving into NEW MEXICO,

we drove through the main street in Tucumcari which kind of put Glenrio to shame – primarily because it is still a “live” town.  Roughly half (if not more) of the buildings are the empty hotels and gas stations, but there is one unbelievable gem in the midst of all of this – the Blue Swallow Motel – which apparently had been run by the same woman for the past 40 years and was just purchased by the new owner (from Illinois!) about 10 days ago.  

Each guest room has its own attached garage and each garage has unique murals painted in them. 

There is a courtyard where all of the guests socialize, and all room and outdoor décor is original from the 50’s and 60’s.  While we couldn’t enter an empty room due to Covid, we could walk around and peek in the garages and visit (from 6’ away) with some of the guests who were socializing in the courtyard.  

Highly recommend this place as a stop and would totally stay there if we ever needed lodging in Tucumcari, NM.

The rest of the day was a bit of a bust.  We tried to visit the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa – a popular place for scuba diving because it is a naturally occurring water filled hole where the water is ridiculously clear because it is replenished every 6 hours (or 6 days) – it was 6 somethings.  Supposedly 100’ visibility.  Sadly, closed due to Covid and the no trespassing signs were too prevalent to consider sneaking in. 

On a higher note, we did find a fantastic hole in the wall Mexican restaurant a few blocks away – The Comet II -  and ordered take-out to the car in the parking lot and ate our dinner off the hood of the car.  Classy.

Last stop of the day (night) was the stop I was looking forward to maybe even more so than seeing Uranus (couldn’t resist).  It was the Musical Road in Tijeras.  The story goes – if you drive a stretch of road going eastbound at exactly 45 MPH, the specially placed rumble strips in the road will play America the Beautiful.  Who doesn’t want to do that?  Given that we spent way too much time doing other ridiculous stuff, by the time we got to the spot, it was totally dark out and minutes from a massive thunderstorm.  We drove that damn road like 3 times and got no music.  After googling the crap out of it, I realized that the NM DOT recently repaved the road and decided not to put the rumble strips back in.  This is (was) literally one of two musical highways in the US and one of seven in the world!  Why couldn’t they keep it???  If you want to experience what it should have sounded like, here is a YouTube video from when it worked – so freaking cool.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgizA_vDlzs 

Side note on New Mexico and Covid – they are serious in this state.  Cases are low, mask wearing is high and they make no qualms about how much they don’t want visitors sticking around (presumably bc they are surrounded by Arizona and Texas).  In any case, nearly every possible camping spot was closed (due to Covid) so we opted for a last-minute hotel.  Anyone who knows me knows that I am a Hyatt devotee, so we found a Hyatt, used my points and luxuriated in air conditioning, a soft bed, a shower, and well, what more does one need.