Is there a better museum name than “Devil’s Rope Museum”? That’s rhetorical. No, not there isn’t. I picked up a leaflet that says; “Are you interested in the exciting hobby of Antique Barbed Wire, Fence Tolls, Hammers, Pliers, and odd Combination Tools? Then the Antique Barbed Wire Society is for you!” If you’re interested I’ll pass the details on.
The Leaning Tower of Texas. “ Ralph Britten, who owned the local Tower Fuel Stop, decided to buy it cheap as an eye-grabber for his business. But he didn't paint "Tower Fuel Stop" on it, he painted "Britten USA," and he purposefully placed it at a slant to draw attention.”
A lot of the radio is Christian based and someone uttered; “I never saw someone speaking in tongues in a night sponsored honky tonk” which you don’t really get much back at home. The first two things we heard were for a test to see if your horse might be predisposed to athritis and then the latest oil prices. It did feel very Texan.
We were down to a quarter of a tank of gas so were looking for a gas station and passed quite a few abandoned ones. We pulled in to what we thought was also just a relic and wandered to over to a group of guys chatting round a truck to ask where we could fill up. They said it wasn’t a relic and we could fill up here. No pre-pay necessary. I picked a pump and nothing seemed to happen, so I put the nozzle back and tried a different one. Nope. The guy came out from the shop and pressed some (definitely hidden away) button and it worked. Post fuelling we were looking at what needed to type into the GPS for our next stop and the guy came back out, tapped on the window and gave us a handful of pens. So if you need fuel then go and get it from Groom Fuel (806) 248 7586.
Through McLean with it’s mix of nice new homes, abandoned buildings and a tiny Phillips 66 station, built to service and fuel cars and opened in 1929, and now restored.
There were a few things to see in Amarillo. “Combine City” which is supposed to be a Cadillac Ranch type thing for combine harvesters, but was quite disappointing. The bad photo does it justice.
And then the slightly better Ozymandias of the Plains. The plaque reads;
In 1819 while on their horseback trek over the Great Plains of New Spain, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (author of "Frankenstein") came across these ruins. Here Shelley penned these immortal lines:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In Groom, Texas we saw the second largest cross in the State. It’s nineteen stories tall. I had a fleeting chat about American not being founded as a Christian nation on the grounds that the founding fathers were mostly deists, not Christians. I was directed to someone who started on about some conspiracy theory about England being run by the Rothschilds.
Our final two stops were the Second Amendment Cowboy (a Big Thing), and then Cadillac Ranch where we did a bit of spraying on the Cadillacs.
We ended up at our motel in Vega. Tomorrow we’ll get into New Mexico and a new timezone.
