Tucumcari and Cadillac Ranch

We have been traveling east, slowly but steadily, the past few weeks. I need to get caught up on my blog posts. Most of the pictures I'm posting tonight were taken well over a week ago when we were in Tucumcari and Amarillo.

I've always really liked Tucumcari. It's a small town on Route 66 that has really retained a lot of the old Route 66 character.  We drove around town taking pictures of murals, signs and some of the buildings. Many of these are very famous Route 66 icons.

On our last night in Tucumcari we made a special trip out to get a picture of the Blue Swallow Motel lit up at night. I've always wanted to see it at night but the timing was never right so I was pretty excited to finally get this picture.

The next day we headed out of New Mexico and back into Texas. Our destination was Palo Duro Canyon, about 20 miles south of Amarillo. Just outside of Amarillo we stopped at another famous Route 66 attraction: Cadillac Ranch. It was about 100 degrees that day and we were surprised at how many people were there. Most people had cans of spray paint to paint the Cadillacs but we just took pictures and tried to avoid paint fumes.

 From there we went to Canyon, Texas to visit Palo Duro Canyon and then on to Caprock Canyons State Park for the weekend. It was beautiful at both of these state parks and I have a bunch of pictures but I'll save them for my next post. We're now at Lake Texoma on the Texas/Oklahoma border and should be in Arkansas soon. We're having a really great trip. This route we're taking runs just a bit south of Interstate 40 and we're both loving being off the interstate. We won't be passing through Oklahoma on this trip but we did drive up there tonight in the Jeep to get a pizza. The park we're in is cheap and nice and has good internet so I think we're going to stay another night before heading to Arkansas. I'll probably post another blog post tomorrow with all my canyon pictures.

Thanks for stopping by!