The OLD 66

It's not enough that we have to listen to big rigs idling all night long next to most RV parks. We also have to avoid them on the highway. A speeding monster truck can create enough suction to flip a trailer, especially if it's windy. So when and where we can, we take the so-called "road less traveled". In this case, a thirty-mile stretch of Old 66 in far eastern New Mexico. Only problem was, we discovered this was a stretch built in the early 1920s and never paved. So it was pretty much in its original condition. Dusty, dirty and no place to turn around. We were committed. There's not a soul to be seen along the way but at one time this was the only way to travel east and west between Tucumcari and Amarillo. Ghostly reminders of what once was.

We crossed over old wooden bridges with eight-and-ten ton load limits. And believe me, you have to quickly calculate your weight (we come in at four-to-five tons). But still you wonder if this thing is going to hold up.

Free-range cattle watch the occasional idiots like ourselves who choose to take this adventure-filled side trip.

But believe me, it's worth the ruts in the road to get off the busy, high-speed interstate with nothing but billboards, modern franchises and lots 'o traffic. You don't learn a hell of a lot that way. And remember, it's not the destination. It's the journey.

The picture above, by the way, is an roadside "motor hotel" from the 1920s or '30s. I was poking around taking photos until I discovered that someone is actually living in one of the units. Maybe a squatter like a modern-day dust bowler. This oldest part of Route 66 was the ribbon of highway that took refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and Texas west to the promised land of California. My Dad's family traveled this highway from Prague, Oklahoma to Shanghai, China. (In the 1940s my Dad escaped the confines of the family farm and joined the Marine Corps. Served in Asia during and after World War II.)

This is where you would have filled up the old jalopy back when gas was probably less than twenty cents a gallon. Look between the two trees, far off in the distance. You can see the top of a big rig traveling I-40, the highway that sent these little places into oblivion.

The inside of the old filling station has been trashed. The roof has caved in and the elements have taken over.

Remember the old bucket seats? Someone who knows cars can probably identify where this type came from. Beats me.

After thirty miles of sucking dust into the trailer (and into our lungs), we veered back onto I-40...

...in the direction of Amarillo, where fundamentalist preachers scream across radio stations, begging for money, condemning every sin under the sun (mostly liberal, of course) but gluttony here is still a virtue. Oh, and you can still smoke in restaurants. How enlightened these clowns are. This place, "The Fabulous Texan" is a well-known monument to overindulgence. If you can eat one of its 72-ounce steaks in one hour, you get it for free. It'll cost you nothing but it will probably kill you. Yee-hah.