Is this the way to Amarillo?

Road Trip: Day Five. Miles travelled: 1838

States visited: 6. Time zones covered: 3

I was up at 7am this morning. Our hotel room last night was a palatial suite with a bed the size of a van. I didn't sleep very well, however. I had a dry, tickly cough and the black out curtains in the room disorientated me. Today's journey took us from Santa Fe to Amarillo along Historic Route 66. We'd designated it as a day of Americana and quirkiness, and decided to soak in as many of those old-school roadside attractions as we could possibly find.

We set off through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we experienced a few drops of rain. Our first on the trip. The aroma of rain in the desert was one of the most pungent and alluring smells I've ever experienced. We passed through a highly charming village called Madrid which bills itself as having "ten unique shops." All the buildings in the town are ramshackle and wood-built. The shops are filled to the rafters with bric-a-brac and curios. It felt a shame to be passing through without stopping, but we had Tinkertown to visit!

Tinkertown sits in a secluded, green and tranquil spot in the hills somewhere above Route 66. The wooden buildings are lined with glass bottles which glow in the sunlight. It was set up by a married couple, Carla and Ross Ward. Ross was an artist who specialised in painting carnival rides and attractions. He died of Alzheimer's a few years ago, but his wife continues to look after their legacy.

And what a legacy! Tinkertown is an exploration into all things tiny! It started its life as a Wild West exhibit which they toured, in a trailer, as a portable attraction. The Wild West exhibit is about ten metres long and features a street of houses - a saloon, a photographer's gallery, a shop selling ice cream, a blacksmiths - filled with carefully carved wooden figurines dressed in nineteenth century garb. Some of it is automated. Couples dance. A steam train rolls forward. Mary Poppins flies out of the roof of the ice cream shop. (So random!) Everything is utterly whacky and anachronistic, but that is its point.

And you go from room to room seeing circus scenes, automated fortune tellers, photographs of freak shows from the early 20th Century... It's part penny arcade, part art gallery. It feels like the life's work of two eccentric artists, with an eye for the bizarre, rescuing quirky objects from skips, fair backlots and hotel clearances. It's an earthier, more shambolic version of Small Small World at DisneyLand.

Everywhere you go, little painted inspirational quotes fill the walls: "Invention consists of imagination and a scrap heap" - Thomas Edison.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds" - - Albert Einstein

"You don't stop playing because you grow old... You grow old because you stop playing. " And so it goes on.

My favourite part was a small collection of white, inch-long porcelain children wrapped in blankets, which were apparently known as "Frozen Charlotte Dolls," based on a Victorian ballad of a young girl who died in a Christmas blizzard!

Otto's fabulously tuneless One Man Band was also a highlight.

When we left the building, we came across a couple of elderly photographers who were patiently sitting in front of a humming bird feeder, attempting to get the perfect image of a broadtail humming bird. And they were spoilt for choice really. The birds were everywhere, dive-bombing the feeders, dive-bombing each other, hovering inexplicably in mid-air as they fed. The rushing, flapping sound they make as they sail past your face is quite extraordinary. The male birds are particularly attractive: green with bright red spot on their chests. It was really quite magical.

Next up was Santa Rosa, City of Natural Lakes, largely famous for its Blue Hole, but, for Nathan and me, also the name of a very early ABBA song... so early, in fact, that it predates the arrival in the group of Agnetha and Frida!

We left Interstate 40 and took the historic Route 66 into Santa Rosa where we caught our first glimpse of the road side America I'd been so desperate to see: the bright, tatty signs, often neon lit, stretching ever higher into the sky in an attempt to attract passing drivers. Some of the signs are broken. Some of the letters are missing. Former garages and diners collapse and rust into scrubland. A truck load of water melons is parked by the side of the road...

The Blue Hole itself is magnificent. It's situated in a completely unremarkable area on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. It's actually a natural spring which has probably been a quarry at some point and it is a wonderful spot for a natural swim. The "hole" is 60 feet in diameter and 81 feet deep. The water is freezing cold, crystal clear and bluer than robins eggs. The sunlight dances on the surface and creates beautiful lined patterns, like bright yellow lasers, deep into the watery depths. It's massively popular with SCUBA divers. You see little groups of them disappearing into the blue and then reemerging twenty minutes later, having, no doubt explored a series of underground caves.


We took the I40 to Tucumcari, which is known locally as "the town that's two blocks wide and two miles long." It was a major stopping-off spot for travellers on the Mother Road and once boasted 2000 motel rooms. The locals are doing their absolute best to re-invent the town as a Historic Route 66 tourist destination, but they have a heck of a long way to go. Most of the motels along the stretch of Route 66 are either boarded over, falling down, or in great need of repair. When the I40 was built, the bottom dropped out of the town. A lot of the fabulous old signs still exist, and, I've read that all the neon looks quite cool at night, but there's a whiff of desperation about things. One of the motels has a huge sign which reads "Clint Eastwood stayed here!"




We stopped off at an empty little souvenir shop which sold Route 66 memorabilia and were served by a charming old lady with a somewhat fragile perm which I wouldn't have wanted to put near a naked flame. She suggested we have our lunch in a motel called Del's, where the waiter was so dry and deadpan, we felt quite scared!




For the next 50 miles we drove along the old Route 66 which runs parallel to the I40. There wasn't a car on the road with us, so we ended up travelling faster than vehicles on the Interstate... until we hit an un-paved, dirt-track section of the road, at which point we slowed to 30mph. Everything along that stretch of road was utterly devastated. Burned-out garages, bashed-up trailers, fabulous ancient signs turning to dust and fading into the plains. Painted onto the side of a semi-dilapidated building, in proud large letters, were the words "modern restrooms."




We stopped off on an entirely empty section of the old road, where a motel was slowly returning to the earth. The noise of crickets was utterly deafening. It was like no sound I've ever heard before. If you approached an area of grass, hundreds of the little critters hopped and flew in the opposite direction. We explored the ruined motel, wandering into some of the bedrooms to see mattresses rotting on threadbare carpets and various magazines and books scattered on the bedside tables. The one I picked up came from 1978. It was a truly eerie experience. A snapshot from the past. 28 Weeks Later. The now defunct Mother Road stretched out into the distance.




And then suddenly we realised we were in

Texas. Texas! How on earth did I ever end up in Texas! To prove we were in a huge American State, the first thing we saw was a wind farm which stretched for what had to be twenty miles.




On the outskirts of Amarillo we visited the Cadillac Ranch, which is another one of those somewhat quirky "attractions" you only get in America. The ranch dates back to 1974 and features 10 whole Cadillac cars, half-buried in mud in the middle of a field. The cars date from 1949 to 1974 and demonstrate the design changes of that particular make over that period of time. It was done by an artists' collective from San Francisco. Of late it's become a popular pastime for people to spray graffiti on the cars, and they are literally thick with layers of paint. The ground around is scattered with cans. Nathan was quite keen to add our initials somewhere and found a half-used can of red paint. We proudly added our initials over the top of a crude picture of a pink penis. We stepped back to admire our work, at which point, someone stepped in, and sprayed a pink penis over our initials! Charming!






Every sign on the outskirts of Amarillo advertises a steak house. Amarillo is the home of the cattle industry in America, so I suppose it's hardly surprising. Our hotel is a bit dire. But we'll sleep well tonight.