Fantasy Edsel
We planned 3 stops on our drive to Amarillo. The first stop was the Route 66 Auto Museum in Santa Rosa. This turned out to be a dealership that tried to rebuild and sell cars from the 30s to the 70s, who lets people walk through his show room for $5 a head. He’s developed a good business of selling cars from the 50s that run well but are somewhat rusted. He says the car “has patina”. It works because in the desert, the cars can develop a “coating” of rust without having the body rusting out. It was way too much money to view the cars, but it was fun and it gave us a good stretch at the 1/3 mark of our drive today.
1935 Airstream Torpedo
Our second stop was a total bust. We got off the interstate to drive through Tucumcari, NM; which was supposed to be trying to make a living on Route 66 era businesses. It turned out that almost all of the Route 66 businesses had gone bust. In all, over 2/3 of the businesses in town had gone belly-up. We visited the Tee Pee Curio shop, which was as bad as it sounds.
55 Airstream
Our last stop was the free RV museum at Jack Sisemore Traveland. This was a gem. Danita and I had a blast looking at camp trailers, camp buses, and more. Above is the oldest Airstream in existance. It was built from plans sold through Popular Science. The ’55 Airstream shown here is less interesting historically, but it’s a beautiful trailer and much more typical of what I think of when I think of an Airstream trailer. Note the way cool bike that matches the Airstream beautifully.
Woodstock or Bust
For the hippies in the crowd, here’s a VW minibus. It’s the perfect vehicle for visiting Woodstock. After viewing the museum, we went to the indoor showroom and walked through several new RVs. We had no sales pressure. We were amazed at what the inside of those huge mobile campers look like. By the time we were done, it was almost 3 and we hadn’t had lunch yet. So we went to a diner and had “lupper”. We have plenty of left overs for an evening snack this evening.
Tomorrow’s goal is Oklahoma City.