Supersize that
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
61
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Amarillo,
Texas,
United States
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
it offers frozen custard butterburgers (today's flavour: hot caramel
pecan)? Or a 32oz steak and a pound of shrimps for USD9.95 or all
you can eat pizza USD3.49? Or soup, salad, dinner roll, baked
potato, 72oz steak (yes, that's about 2kgs) and dessert? - free if
all consumed inside an hour.
Texas. Where everything is bigger, better, faster, stronger, but
mostly bigger and gas guzzling. The roads stretching across the
second largest state are all four or six lane (and all immaculately
maintained - this is not true in Oklahoma). The highways are
populated by the western world's cavalry of 18-wheelers, sucking
vegetation and small animals into their vortex as they pass. Darting
(well, relatively) around these are hordes of shiny new 4WD SUVs and
pickups, the size of garages and on wheel bases so lofty you can
hardly see the Stetson of the driver. Bus sized RVs
lumber along towing their everyday vehicle (usually a truck sized
SUV) and sometimes a boat as well. There's the occasional car, but
they're a rarity. Every driver is unfailingly courteous and law-
abiding. In out of the way places you are frequently pulled over to
ensure you don't have any Mexicans stashed in the boot. In the
country, beside the roads lumber 100-150 flatcar trains, stacked two
shipping containers high and pulled by up to seven diesel-spewing
engines. In towns the freeway is lined with enough fast food joints
for every Texan to eat junk food every day, and car dealerships
jammed with pickups to get you from McDs to Taco Bell.
Away from the plains the landscape is surprisingly green and leafy as
we discovered deviating off the interstate to Hunt in search of
Stonehenge II (never found it).
Cadillac ranch
You regularly see everything fromdeer to chipmunks crossing the road (some more successfully than
others). On the plains industrial sprinkler systems keep crops
hydrated but the grasslands fend for themselves. Cattle are
generally not pastured but kept in grassless corrals and fed on hay -
you can smell a cattle farm from some distance. You do see oil pumps
working in the distance but, disappointingly, never the field of
pumps pecking away like a flock of foraging chickens. Defense
installations, oil refineries, wind farms and weapons plants sprinkle
the landscape.
San Antonio, the first part of Texas we had seen in the daylight, is
the very spot where barbed wire was first demonstrated. It is also
home to the Alamo. An iconic symbol of courage and patriotism, and
Texas, you just have to visit what remains of the original mission.
It is assumed that you understand the story behind the siege and, if
you don't, you don't get a lot of help. The total presentation is
very glossy and not very informative. However, however much you know
of the story, you know no one walked away. That makes the room where
the women sheltered and scratched their names into the walls and the
shrine to the volunteers listing every man who died defending those
women and children (from Davey Crockett to "John, a freed
slave") sobering - tacky souvenirs notwithstanding, Alamo shot glasses
anyone, or how about boxer shorts?.
From San Antonio we detoured into New Mexico for a couple of days and
then back into Texas to Amarillo.
Serious profession - the Amarillo cattle auction
En route, on Route 66, is a shrineto the open road. It is one with which graffiti artists have had
their way. It is, currently and appropriately, predominantly pink.
Called Cadillac Ranch, ten Cadillacs (1949 through 1964 models) are
buried upright in a field. Need we say more?
We'd come for two things: a big fat Texas steak and a cattle auction
(and to continue the perfect cowboy boot hunt). Number 1 was
situated right outside our motel door. At Hoffbrau's for USD24.99
the platter for two consists of soup or salad, a dinner loaf, a 20oz
sirloin served on grilled onion rings and topped with crispy fried
onion rings (they're different) and accompanied by steamed vegetables
and a baked potato the size of a hedgehog smothered with butter, sour
cream, chives, bacon AND cheese. You wash this down with buckets of
beer. The steak was less flavourful than its New Zealand counterpart
but finer grained than Argentine. The whole experience was served up
in a battered wood dining room with squeeze bottles of ketchup and
mustard and industrial bottles of Tabasco. The walls sported stuffed
animal heads and steer skulls with neon signs for Bud and Miller and
God bless Texas. The waiter wore cowboy boots, Wranglers and a
Stetson. There were linen napkins.
Number 2 was not what we were expecting and yet, somehow, it was.
Craggy, Stetson wearing, denim encased, old guys hung around
discussing the relative merits of cattle rails, spurs jingled. The
white coated marshal greeted everyone by name. The cattle were
herded into the auction ring by cowboys and women. The auction ring
was indoors. The cattle were sold individually, not in lots (but
they move 300,000 cattle through the Amarillo stockyards annually).
There were no long horns (or even many horns). No one was gored
although the ring cowboys were fairly agile. Stock were sold (the
ones we saw) by weight going for as little as USD60.00. It was
noisy, smelly and filled with unhappy or belligerent stock and
serious, knowledgeable cowboys doing what they do, not what John
Wayne did.
[Unofficial number 3 is becoming depressing. A proper cowboy boot
should have a pointed toe (for fitting in the stirrup). What you get
today have rounded toes and ... rubber soles! They look like
decorative gumboots!]
Texas was heaps of fun. We saw people swaggering down the street in
insanely pointed cowboy boots, madly tight jeans and every colour of
Stetson (as long as it was black or off-white) you could imagine.
There have been string ties and even spurs. Few tee-shirts - a
cowboy wears a shirt with button cuffs and collar. We haven't seen a
six-shooter out there but they probably are. Texans seem enormously
proud of their cattle wrangling (rustling) heritage and their wild
west hardman image and they really do love neon. But you get the
feeling that even Texans don't take Texans too seriously.
Sign #6: 12 different cellular plans because if we were all the same
it would be creepy.
