TEXAS PANHANDLE, AMARILLO: SLUG BUGS AND CADILLACS

March 18-19, 2021

Let me get this out of the way. When Bob first brought up this trip, I was not excited.  I mean, how much do you want to visited the Texas Panhandle? He had to dangle the promise of at least one art museum in front of me and a few quirky destinations (two of which are covered in this post). He also promised we would spend some time in Central Texas and end the trip in Austin. It helped that I was desperate to leave home. We were supposed to be traveling to the Galapagos Islands during my March 2021 Spring Break, and even Texas sounded better than staying home and moping.

We flew out of Ontario, had an hour-long layover in Dallas, and then had a short flight to Amarillo.  On our arrival, Bob started singing the 1973 song "Amarillo by Morning" and unfortunately didn't stop singing it for several days. 

We were welcomed to the small Amarillo Airport by this statue of Rick Husband, an Amarillo native who was killed aboard the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

We picked up the keys to our rental car and walked out to the parking lot. Just as we were getting in our car, Bob realized he didn't have his main bag. We hurried back into the terminal and found it where he had left it--next to the Rick Husband statue. No one had reported it, and no bomb squad was in sight. Whew.

We spent the night in a Holiday Inn and got rolling at about 8:30 the next morning. It was cold. A huge winter storm had rolled through the area a day before we arrived, and it took a few days to warm up to normal temperatures.

We drove past (but did not stop at) The Big Texan, "Home of the 72 oz. Steak Challenge." Apparently, if you eat the whole thing AND a buttered roll, a salad, a baked potato, and shrimp cocktail, all within an hour or less, you get the meal free. (Otherwise, it will set you back $72.)  We did not stop. (Thank goodness Bob is currently on a meatless diet.)

We DID stop at the Slug Bug Ranch, just outside Conway, Texas. It's a parody version of the more famous Cadillac Ranch, which we visited later in the day. Like its famous cousin, it is really more of a graveyard than a ranch. Five VW Beetles were partially buried, nose-down, in 2002 in a blatant effort to attract tourists to this area that was once the last stop on the main road into Amarillo--until the I-40 replaced Route 66 and bypassed Conway. However, the Bugs weren't enough to save Conway, and the only thing left of them is their exoskeletons.

Front view:

Back view:

An abandoned gas station is crumbling off to one side.

Judging by this structure behind it, the gas station was owned by Texaco.

Another structure, formerly a shop of some sort, sits behind the cars.

The interior décor matches that of the VWs.

The shell of another vehicle is also nearby.

Of all the cars, this is my favorite. Can you see the word "magical" painted on the hood? Of course, tomorrow it might say something else. As far as we could tell, anyone can paint anything they want anywhere on the property.

A tired tire graveyard is part of the charm.

Even the lone tree on the property has fallen victim to the spray painters' artistry.

Apparently, if you have an old vehicle you need to get rid of, this is the place to bring it. There was some kind of hollowed-out SUV partially buried in the stream behind the rest of the outbuildings.

The last place we visited on our first day in the panhandle was Cadillac Ranch, located on Route 66 just west of Amarillo. This is the original car graveyard on which Slug Bug Ranch was based. Cadillac Ranch was created in the 1974 by an artist colony of hippies from San Francisco who called themselves "The Ant Farm." They were funded by one of Amarillo's billionaires, Stanley Marsh 3. (Yes, that's a "3" and not a "III." He was a bit eccentric.) The ten Caddies were driven onto a field owned by Marsh and "planted," nose down, in a line that began with a 1949 Club Sedan and ended with a 1963 Sedan de Ville, each vehicle representing an iteration of the tail fin during those years. They are set back quite a bit from the highway.

Word of this bizarre piece of public art got out, and before long Cadillac Ranch became a Destination. For the first few years, all was well, but then visitors began to rip off pieces of the cars as a souvenir, including all the tail fins. They also began to decorate the cars with spray paint. Marsh and The Ant Farm eventually came to encourage the gradual deconstruction of their work, and today the cars are the bare frames of the original cars and are an ever-changing canvas for taggers.

In 1997, the cars were moved to a new spot two miles west, a bit further from the expanding city of Amarillo.  If you are interested in what the cars looked like in the beginning, check out this website.

Due to the storm that preceded our arrival, and the Caddies were surrounded by a temporary pond.

Does it remind you of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C.? Yeah, me neither.

There were as many as 50 people there when we arrived, and almost everyone wielded a can of spray paint. The fumes were so strong that we could smell them from the entrance, far from the cars themselves. Stick around a while and breathe deeply and you can probably get high here. With no trash can in sight, there were hundreds of spent cans tossed on the ground. Someone must come through occasionally and clean them up.

Where there was dry ground to stand on, visitors were adding their layer to the decades of paint already on the cars. Many of the artists were children being encouraged by adults.

I wasn't surprised to see "Trump 2024" on the roof of one of the Caddies. However, the one behind it has a reference to the Old Testament scripture Isaiah 41:10: "Fear thou not; for I am with the: be not dismayed; for I am the God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." That seems a bit comical here.

There was quite a bit of painting on the ground as well. This one has the word "Aryan" in the center. 

I hate to be a spoil sport, but I don't get the hype. I can't even imagine how toxic all this paint is for the soil and the surrounding air.

Down the street a few blocks is a Cadillac Ranch Gift Shop.  We drove right on by.

READING

We spent a lot of time on the backroads in the Panhandle, and lucky for us, we had a great novel to listen to, and fortuitously, the narrator of the book (Woodrow Wilson Nickel) was actually from the Texas Panhandle!

In West with Giraffes, Lynda Rutledge tells a fictional version of a real event--the transportation of two giraffes from Africa to the San Diego Zoo in 1938. The book begins after they arrive in New York City, having barely survived a sea journey from Africa. In a series of crazy events, young Woody, just 17 years old, becomes the driver of the rig that transports the giraffes west.

Along the way, Rutledge paints a clear picture of Depression-era America. Readers/listeners meet members of the CCC, hear about Hitler advancing in Europe, experience the racism embedded in American culture, and more. They even drive through the Texas Panhandle, where Woodie has to confront the horrors the Dust Bowl wreaked on his family.

I really liked the narrator the narrator of the Audible version. Bob and I found ourselves laughing out loud on more than one occasion, and the story has its poignant moments as well. This is one of the most entertaining books I've listened to in years.