Making Time on the Road

Yesterday was a motivated day on the road.  By that I mean we decided to avoid getting lost in small towns between Oklahoma City and Amarillo by staying on I-40 for the most part.  Don't worry, we made sure we weren't missing anything big in those tiny towns before we by-passed them.  The weather cleared out for us nicely after the blizzard from Tuesday (I actually had to think hard about that one for a while and I'm still not sure I have the right day lol).  We started off from Oklahoma City and visited the Oklahoma City Memorial Museum as our first stop.  It was definitely the highlight of our day!  And it will be at the top of our list of favorite things to have seen during this trip.  Honestly, I never really knew many details about the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building until I walked through the museum.  The creators of the exhibits and the memorial did a really fantastic job.  I was impressed!  I also got a rare NPS Passport stamp.  Who knew the park service co-runs this site?

After we left the museum we got on the highway and drove to Lucille's Diner.  It is a fully functioning replica of an actual diner on Historic Route 66.  There were only two like it in existence. Lucille is apparently the mother of the Mother Road.  

So then, fully fed, we got back on the highway and drove to Erick, OK (still in OK despite our Interstate jaunt) in search of a particular curiosity shop with tons of antiques and some eccentric owners.  Unfortunately, as we have been experiencing regularly because we are traveling in the winter, it was closed when we got there.  The outside was still really cool, though! And I enjoyed the sign out front that read, "Come see rednecks work and play in their natural environment!".  

The same thing happened to us at the Devil's Rope Museum.  Probably a good thing that was closed though, since Danielle pointed out that although Devil's Rope sounded really cool, it was actually just an entire museum devoted to barbed wire.  

After passing through our first "ghost town" and crossing the border into Texas, the sun set and we continued driving in the dark.  We were excited to see the first landmark here which was a spoof of the famous Cadillac Ranch.  Instead of Cadillac's there were about 5 VW Bugs buried nose deep in the dirt.  There were also some other car parts and abandoned buildings covered in graffiti.  It was really neat.

We finally got to our next stop, the Laur's house, south of Amarillo city center around 8:30.  Today Danielle and I got into some more adventures.  I'll be posting about those in a separate entry.