Thursday, May 24, 2007

Wow. We are slackers. Amanda blames it on me, since I'm "the blogger" in the relationship, which I guess is true. I know that a blog that has been active for 17 days and abandoned after day 3 is pretty pathetic, so we'll try to get a few posts up here for y'all. This was from two Thursdays ago.

We started the day in Santa Fe over breakfast with Shosh and her brother Steven. We ate at a place called Tecolate (their menu proudly states "good food - no bread") and I had the "Sheepherder's Breakfast" which came with 2 different types of chili and was so spicy the waitress brought me a pitcher of water with a straw. Which I used.

We then walked around the historic (read: touristy) part of town for a few hours and really enjoyed ourselves. The shops and art galleries were all very charming and it would have been great if we could have spent at least another day there. I saw a great little guitar shop that I went into with the idea of playing around with one or two of them before I realized I don't really play well enough to walk into a guitar shop and play around with really expensive guitars. It was cool, though.

We left Santa Fe and hit the Texas state line around 5:00, at which point we got out and took the picture posted below. We then stopped in Amarillo to check out the Cadillac Ranch. For those of you who don't know, the Cadillac Ranch is a weird piece of art in a cow pasture. There are about 8 or so Cadillacs that are upended into the ground, sticking straight up in the air. I don't know the history, but some guy just decided to plant a bunch of Caddys in a field face first a number of years ago. They used to be painted blue (according to the road trip book we'd been consulting, which may have explained the history, but we've already given it back to our friend Tracy who lent it to us), but evidently some punk kids have been spraypainting them for God knows how long, because now they look like a New York City subway car circa 1982. Not that I ever saw a New York City subway car in 1982, but you get my drift. Actually, there was some teenage girl out there spraypainting while we were there, and she gave us a pretty good dinner recommendation. Next time you're in Amarillo, stop at Blue Sky for a damn good burger.

After dinner it was just a dark drive through farm country on our way to Wichita Falls, where we found a room at the coolest Howard Johnson hotel I've ever seen. They had a pool, gym, shuffleboard court, and an arcade, all in the lobby. The whole place smelled like chlorine. It was great, but I enjoy the smell of chlorine. If you don't, you might not have liked the hotel.

Friday entailed a really REALLY boring drive to Houston, mostly through rain. We'll post more about the weekend in Houston, as well as our week at Camp Dream Street, in a little while. This should get you through until then. And again, sorry for the delay.