Route 66 Holiday - October 2022 - Part 4

---

Route 66 Blog part 4



18^th October 2022 – 21^st October

From Amarillo, we drove to Cadillac Ranch. This was a short drive from our hotel, and it was a quick stop along the way. Cadillac Ranch is located in a field where 10 Cadillac cars, dating from between 1949 and 1963. These cars were installed in 1974 by Chip Lord. The cars have been installed with their noses concreated into the dirt. Apparently they are at the same angle as the Great Pyramids in Giza, Egypt.

These cars were an art installation, however they are now a community/ tourist attraction and ongoing canvas for many generations. Locals and tourists are invited to bring cans of spray paint to make their mark, and of course we made ours – luckily there were a few cans of paint left by previous visitors. Your artwork doesn’t stay visible for too long as others add to it. In places, you can see the many, many layers of paint that has been added over the years.

From the ranch we made our way to Adrian via Vega. Vega is a small town where Jane Harwell - the creator of the ugly crust pie lives. She used to own the Midpoint Café in Adrian but sold it years ago. However, she still makes the pies to be sold at the café as well as her own store in Adrian. We visited the Milburn-Price Culture Museum where we got another stamp on the passport - used an old fashioned printer to make my own postcard and a squashed penny. This tiny museum is full of antiques from the old cowboy days. The museum also has a 9/11 monument and the world’s largest cattle iron.

From Vega, we stopped off at the Midpoint Café – the half way point of Route 66. This café sits at exactly 1139 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Adrian has the famous Café, a gas station and a motel as well as some old signs for the café. This stretch of road is mostly empty, just the Midpoint and a few houses scattered around. Unfortunately, the café was closed due to staff shortages and thus we couldn’t get a pie.

It was an hour’s drive to Tucumcari to visit the famous Blue Swallow Motel, TeePee Curious and to see some of the old motels with their original neon signs. It was strange seeing this main road so empty of both people and cars. However, this is the theme of Route 66 today – lots of small towns now abandoned because of the new highways. From here we arrive at Santa Rosa to take a look at the Route 66 Auto Museum – there are a LOT of car museums on route 66 – and then onto The Blue Hole.

The Blue Hole is exactly what the name suggests – the hole is a crystal clear body of water that is a bell shape. It is around 80 feet across at the surface and around 130 feet deep. The water comes from an underground source some 200 feet below. The Hole is a collapsed cave with many cave passages for divers, and is popular in the hot summer month as the water is a constant 17 degrees. Unfortunately, the site has been the site of a few deaths where divers have got into difficulty and lost their lives to the deep. Neither of us went to take a swim as I cannot swim and we didn’t have costumes. We spent around an hour here talking to a few others who were visiting the site and partaking in swimming as well as on the Route 66 tour.



Our next stop on the Route - Albuquerque, New Mexico – home to Aliens and Walter White of Breaking Bad fame.

---