Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

Painting of Historic Route 66 in a garage at the
Blue Swallow Motel

Yes, we are in Oklahoma tonight.  Rain and tornados followed behind us for an hour or two, but we are safely tucked in for the night.  There are lots of full hotels in the area, though (this is the second one we stopped at).  And parking lots filled with trucks--workers obviously here to clean up after last week's tornados.  We are planning to leave early in the morning to escape this somewhat unnerving state.

Appropriate sign at the ghost town of Cuevo, NM

Still, we had another excellent day of travel from New Mexico, across the Texas panhandle and halfway across Oklahoma.  We had thought we'd be good and stay off Route 66, but several times were side-tracked to points of interest, often pulling a U-turn to go back to something we'd passed.  Once, we were saved from a possible accident because we stopped at the ghost town (literally) of Cuervo, NM.  We actually turned around and went up a (deserted) one-way street (for a bit) to get back to it.  We got out and explored the abandoned buildings before moving on...right into a traffic stand-still of mostly tractor trailer trucks (reminded me of our border crossing from Zambia into Botswana, going through all those trucks on foot).  Turns out it was an accident involving two motorcycles.  Looked worse than it probably was, though.

The Mexican eatery where we ate our lunch.

We took a couple of detours onto Route 66 just to break the monotony.  We saw a lot of cool signs and buildings and ate at a home-town, home-cooked Mexican place called "Unburritable."  Loved that name!  The food was pretty good, too.  Another Route 66 stop was the Blue Swallow Motel (look it up, it's pretty cool).  We met the owner and got a tour of the place.  Quite charming!

We stopped briefly in Amarillo to get something to drink at Starbuck (Iced Chai Latte for me) and to see the Cadillac Ranch, an interesting art instillation in the middle of a cow pasture.  We saw many other interesting things along the roadside as we whizzed by, looking them up on my trusty 3G iPhone so we could be truly enlightened travelers :)

Here are some of my favorite photos of the nearly 300 we took today:

Joe Bear and La Rosa de Lima at a
Hispanic Catholic Church we
stopped at (we saw the spire and
drove through the village until we
found it).

Abandoned home next door to the church at Cuevo, NM.

Linda's artistic view of the house and church.

The Cadillac Ranch--10 Cadillacs in the middle of
a cow pasture!!!

Close up of the half-buried Cadillacs.

Linda and Rondi in the heat of the day in the
middle of a cow pasture looking at Cadillac
graffiti!!!

The Blue Swallow Motel

Linda hanging out with some bikers along Route 66 :)

For the numerically challenged!

A giant cross by a church surrounded by
much smaller crosses.

Welcome to Oklahoma!

Bright colors along the roadside in OK.

More bright colors

Wind generators along the OK roadside.