Claire the Armadillo: statues

Sunday, January 5, 2014

EPIC ROAD TRIP: The End of the Road

Midday Sunday we reached Amarillo (Armadillo...heh), Texas. It was DEAD. SILENT. So much so that Nikki had some kind of random freak out while she was driving around trying to find a place to have lunch. She kept saying, "It's not a real city. It's not a real city" over and over. Finally, Lauren made her pull over into an abandoned parking lot so she could take over driving. Nikki is way too weird for her own good sometimes.

We found a restaurant open on a lonely street of closed businesses, mostly banks and corporate stuff like that. It was called Acapulco, and hardly anyone there spoke English. We didn't care though, because Mexican food is basically the best thing ever, and here we had found a genuine one!

Very pretty building too!

Know what else is the best thing ever? Frozen sangria.

After the girls got buzzed on sangria, they realized that driving wouldn't be a solid plan, at least for a little while. So they took advantage of the empty streets by posing with some of the city's statues.

Nikki loves reading, so she wanted to join this mother and her children for story time.

What captured our attention?

The Bible! Kinda odd that there's a religious statue in the city, but if Amarillo is a religious place, then that would explain why no one was around on a Sunday afternoon.

Lots of cities have "themed" statues that best represent what their city is all about. Baltimore, for example, has crab statues. Denver has cow statues. Amarillo, Texas has quarter horse statues. Our first photo op was with "Horse Feathers."

So patriotic!

Sponsored by the American Quarter Horse Association

I should be a horse jockey! I'm the perfect size.

Nikki tested whether or not the statue would hold a human's weight. Turns out, yes. (Look at how empty the street is!)

Lauren and her pretty pointy toes

Lisa showing off how fab she looks on a horse

Not sure what this horse's name is. I'll call it "Deep in the Heart of Texas."

This seems about right. :p

I'm the size of Texas!

We walked back to the car and set out for our final "official" destination: Cadillac Ranch, a SUPER COOL art installation in the middle of this field off the highway. A guy bought the land and "planted" a bunch of Caddies into the ground and let people paint all over them. Obviously, we had to take advantage of this opportunity!

Heading towards the ranch's entrance...

Valid rule.

Even the entrance is artsy!

COOL!!!

Lisa is ready to graffiti some cars!

Layers upon layers of spray paint. I wonder what these cars originally looked like?

Nikki repped the Ravens on this car! (The purple wheel & the yellow writing on the side.)

Lauren had a tetanus shot recently, so she figured climbing inside the car wouldn't hurt!

Queens of the cars!

I wanted to make sure that people knew I came from Denver to visit!

Here are some examples of the cool graffiti that people put on the cars:

A dad spent 15 minutes painting this for his daughters. They were so delighted!

15 minutes later, these boys started painting over it. Art is so impermanent!

Peekaboo!

Even straight-laced tourists stopped by! Hopefully they wore smocks though, because it was really windy that day!

ONWARD TO VICTORY!

Covered from head to toe in spray paint (told you it was windy!), we left our spray paint cans with some kids who hadn't brought any and hit the road again. We were heading west towards New Mexico, which we'd only get to pass through on our way back home. Texas, like the Midwest and all the states we'd driven through so far, was nothing but sky, flat land, and road stretching out past the horizon.

On our way through Texas, we saw a sign for the tiny town of Dalhart. Nikki asked that we stop there, as the town was a central focus in a book she'd recently read called The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl, which ravaged the Midwest during the 1930s. We wouldn't get to walk around it, mainly because there wasn't much "it" to walk around, and also because we didn't have the time, but we were able to get a picture of Nikki in front of the town's sign.

We kept driving (and driving and driving) and were passing through the town of Clayton when we noticed a sculpture that made us pull over for a chance to snap some photos.

Awesome metal dragon attacking a building!

That wasn't the only sculpture the artist (unknown to me, unfortunately) had prominently installed on Clayton's main street...

This guy looks like a less colorful, slightly less demonic looking version of "Blucifer" a.k.a. "Demon Horse" a.k.a. "Blue Mustang," which stands tall in front of the Denver International Airport. It was our favorite piece of art on the main street.

Famous citizen Charmayne James

This beautiful mural on Main Street said goodbye to us as we traveled farther west towards home.

Nikki's camera died somewhere in New Mexico. Because it was getting dark anyway, she decided that charging it would be silly. We looked at the beautiful mesas that turned into the Rocky Mountains as we sped past them, often the only car on the road. By the time we got home to Lauren's house in Aurora, it was after 11:00pm. We were tired and FREEZING; the three girls were in tee shirts and shorts because it had been 90* in Amarillo and Clayton, but it was still early spring in Colorado, meaning freezing temperatures, especially at night. I put Nikki's scarf on and waited in the car while the girls said good-bye. We drove home, dragged our stuff into the apartment, and promptly fell asleep.

I'd LOVE to take another Epic Road Trip, maybe heading west this time, over the mountains and into Utah, or get a chance to check out New Mexico. There's a big country to explore. I can't wait to do just that.

The end.

...especially for all the bugs that hit our windshield.

Friday, June 21, 2013

EPIC ROAD TRIP: History

While we were in Wamego, KS for the ironically-named Tulip Festival, Lisa, Lauren, Nikki, and I stopped by the Wamego Historical Society & Museum to learn more about this awesome little town. If you're there (and you REALLY SHOULD go!), definitely stop by. They have a lot of cool and random stuff to see. It was a little mean, but how Lisa described the museum is PERFECT: "It's filled with stuff that kids donated after their parents died."

We first visited the Dutch Mill, a wicked-old (100 years!) windmill that was made by Amish settlers to grind wheat into flour. My favorite fun fact about the mill is that it was originally located 12 miles outside of Wamego, but when they moved it into town, they wrote numbers on all of the stones so they could put it back in the exact order in which it was built! GENIUS! They don't use it anymore, obviously, mainly because they have those Christmas lights on it, and getting the lights tangled is bad news bears. You can go inside the mill, and we talked with a really nice guy who told us the history and answered our (many) questions.

Inside the main museum building, there were really awesome, well-constructed displays of just about everything related to every day life in Wamego from settler days to recent times. The biggest display immediately in the front was all about a former resident named Sergeant Harold Edwin Fetcher. He was in World War II in Italy and was killed in action in October 1944. They couldn't find his remains until October 2006. Can you even imagine what that must have been like for his family?! Crazy.

Kind of funny and sarcastic

WHOA! Check out the shrapnel marks in this helmet!

Artifacts (is that the right word for something that's not SUPER old?) that they found with Sgt. Fetcher's body

Nikki's favorite exhibit in the museum was a nice tribute to Hod Dendurent, a major figure in Wamego who played a clown every year in the parade. He was a beloved figure for generations, and it was really nice to see him honored like this. Nikki may or may not have teared up. (She's really emotional like that.)

Trigger warning if you're scared of clowns!

Gotta admit, the costumes are pretty weird
Two really nice articles in the local paper about Hod:

and

Sorry they're hard to read because of the glare; it's tough to take pics like this when you're short, Nikki says

MY favorite part of the museum was this stuffed bison they had just hanging out! She's got a name and everything. (There's a little more about her in the museum's main webpage that I linked at the top of the blog.

Look at that name!!!!!

I think I need to make a tag for the blog for bison. Pretty sure this is the second one I've hung out with.

Some info about bison (note: NOT the same as buffalo!)

One of the creepier exhibits at the Wamego Historical Society & Museum was about and old-school dentist.

It showed off all of his tools including dentures and other fake teeth. Since I don't have teeth, and since Nikki's got GREAT teeth (according to her dentist), neither of us were freaked out about the exhibit just because it was of a dentist. There's just something creepy about old dentures, knowing that these were in the mouths of people who are now DEAD. (ew ew ew ew ew!)

Like, who looks at their grandparents' dentures when they're cleaning out their houses after the funeral and thinks, "This would be AWESOME for the historical museum to have on display!"?!

Pick your fake teeth color, like picking nail polish for a manicure!

In keeping with my tradition of posing with statues, we took a picture of me next to this GIANT tree carving.

Info about the statue

Portrait of the artist and his creation

Nikki got to nerd out in one exhibit that featured a real weird but effective solution to a very serious public health problem: tuberculosis. A doctor saw that people who were just walking around the streets were hocking loogies on the sidewalk, and that was transmitting TB into the air where other people could catch it. So he employed TB patients to make bricks with a reminder on them that spitting wasn't cool.