Amarillo and Santa Rosa

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After Oklahoma City, our next major objective was Quartzsite, Arizona. Because that’s just too far for a single day’s drive and we’ve grown accustomed to driving no more than 3 hours or so, and the number of reasonably decent RV parks on that route is limited, especially with all the snowbirds on the move, we made reservations for five stops enroute: Amarillo, Texas, Santa Rosa and Grants New Mexico, and Holbrook and Flagstaff, Arizona.

Our drive from Oklahoma City to Amarillo was long and straight and flat, with a whole lot of very little unusual scenery. The roads were mostly pretty nice, and just amazingly full of semis and their trailers. Of course, we’re not very different when hauling our 37-foot 5th wheel, but can almost always maintain speed when going up hills while many semis slow down when going up and really make time when going downhill. As a result, we sometimes get into an unintentional game of leapfrog while traveling the long highway stretches.

Our stay in Amarillo was at a park called Big Texan RV Ranch, and we were in a brand new section that was very nice. There was an indoor pool, too, which was a nice treat because most other RV park pools have closed by this time of the season.

This park offered a free shuttle to the Big Texan Steak Ranch, a restaurant offering a free dinner to anyone who could eat a whole 72-ounce steak, a few shrimp, a baked potato, a roll, and a salad. And anybody who made the effort had to sit up on a stage so everyone could watch. Natalie and I bought a dinner for two and split the steak, which was good.

The restaurant is one big room with long tables, with groups seated along the big tables, and after 4:00 PM, they are busy enough to have a waiting list. While waiting, they invite you to visit their gift shop, which is pretty interesting. The main thing to see in the gift shop is a very large rattlesnake in an aquarium. It’s very shy, and hides quite effectively, but you can’t miss the size of the thing.

There was also an RV museum, which is really the owner’s hobby. It is like an aircraft hangar in which he displays his collection of restored RVs and describes some of the history of RVing, from the earliest models when an RV was a new concept, right up to until today. It is quite interesting and very definitely not an elegant museum, but the owner has acquired and repaired a good collection of RVs, and included a bit of interesting history to display along with some of the RVs. It is a true labor of love.

He has collected several older cars and motorcycles, displayed in an adjacent building. One of these caught my fancy: a 1973 Triumph Bonneville. I had a 1972 model, and still remember the pleasure I had with it, so nostalgia did strike. The main difference with the ’73 version was a bigger engine – it was the first year they sold it with the 750cc engine. Mine was plenty big at 650. As a matter of fact, I had that bike in Oklahoma until we sold it to a couple guys who were going to turn it into a chopper, and that would have been a sacrilege to a mighty fine bike. Oh well, it was no longer mine to care about.





Out of Amarillo, the roads are so bumpy you know they were built by men who rode horses first and like that ride.

Mesas are flat top ridges with sharp sides, while buttes are pointed with layered sides, and there’s an abundance of them in the Southwest. Some of the views are really interesting, but other times, it can become rather monotonous.

0ne sight we just couldn’t get past soon enough was windmills. They begin just west of Amarillo, and just never end until you cross into New Mexico. I found it disturbing to see all these machines and know the Texas power authorities shut down their reliable power plants in favor of these things, then had them fail in the middle of the very hard winter a couple years ago and leave a goodly portion of their population without any heat when they needed it most. Fortunately, Texans may have started returning to reliable power with the election just concluded.



After Amarillo, we stopped in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, a town that seems to be trying not to be a ghost town along Historic Route 66. The area near the RV park in Santa Rosa is almost like a ghost town, with one single story empty building after another for a couple miles, and it looks and feels almost desolate.

Remember the show: “Get your kicks along Route 66”? Well Route 66 is still here, still a major road trip for many a baby boomer, and the other end of town is where you see signs of the town’s heyday as a good stop on the highway. The buildings are still in good repair and many businesses look to be doing okay. We had a nice meal at a Mexican restaurant attached to a hotel, and other parts of the main highway through town still give a bit of the taste and feel of that road trip era. Now, though, it still leaves you wondering where all the people are, and what makes the town a place to live.

One thing that draws people to Santa Rosa is the Blue Hole. It’s a very small lake just off the main highway, but is one of 6 very special lakes all interconnected underground. Its water is extremely clear, deep blue, and stays at a constant temperature of 61 degrees. It completely refreshes itself every 6 hours with the underground water flow from the other interconnected lakes, a phenomenon I’ve heard of in Florida, but was news to me here. Then again, most of what we’re learning on this journey is news to me.

The Blue Hole is 60 feet in diameter, 81 feet deep and absolutely clear blue. You can see all the way to the bottom. In the photos, you can see the sides of porous rock, and there are caves underwater. The lake is sort of a mecca for scuba divers, who like to explore along the sides and bottom, although some of the cave openings have been blocked off with gratings because divers on expeditions to explore the caves failed to return. Now, the lake has several markers on the bottom, attached to buoys on the surface, which are placed there for reference by the scuba divers.

While we were there, two college-aged kids on a drive through town came to the lake and dove in from the high rock diving platform and swam across. They said it was refreshing and I’m sure they were right. I like the water a bit warmer, myself.

The building adjacent to the Blue Hole includes a diving center, where the divers pay the $20 weekly fee for the privilege of diving the lake. Others are welcome to swim to their hearts’ content, and I’m sure it would be very nice throughout New Mexico summers. The building also includes conference rooms and a series of posters and memorabilia along the walls, sort of a mini-museum, mostly about the history of Route 66 but also a few bits of additional information about the Blue Hole.

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Photos

Big Texan RV Park
Our site was # 201

Big Texan Steak House 05
The snake hides well, but is there