This is Part Two of the blog post for the trip to Kansas City and Michigan. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to Part One. And here, for what it's worth, is a link to all the pictures from this trip.
I know you're seething with curiosity, so I'll tell you that, Yes, I did find some good eats in Bowie: at a Tex-Mex restaurant that turned out (despite Google Map's prediction of how long it'd take to get there) to be right across the street from my hotel. Brisket enchiladas with rice and charro beans, and a salsa crema to which I added a mild salsa picante. And a really big frozen margarita that made me really glad that I only had to drive, oh, a hundred yards to get back to my room.
I'll also mention one thing I forgot from yesterday: another bust. In the town of Aurora, Texas, there was supposed to be the grave of a space alien. I found it on Roadside America. I went there. When I got there, I found a fairly large cemetery, so I looked up the listing to see if it showed where in the cemetery this space alien's grave was supposed to be. Really wish I'd read through all the comments before driving out there, because several comments mention the fact that the grave marker had been removed. Nothing to see. Well, that kind of puts the cherry on yesterday's wandering, doesn't it.
So: today. First thing, I put the top down. There were lots of clouds, but they were the light, puffy kind that held no threat of rain. I had breakfast in a restaurant next door to my hotel -- Longhorn Cafe, I want to say: excellent service, good food, good prices, very popular with the locals, who gather in large groups to discuss local concerns. Not a "Trump 2024" sign in sight. (In fact, I've yet to see that sort of sign anywhere along this trip so far. Considering how often I see it to the west of San Antonio -- like in Arizona -- that's surprising.) These people seem to have returned to norbal.
I get to my first stop, the Horton Car Museum in Nocona, just as they open at 9AM. I didn't expect to spend more than an hour there, because I knew from online information that it was "mostly Corvettes," and while Corvettes are pretty -- at least up to about 1990 -- they're not that uncommon. Okay, the earliest Vettes, from the '50s, are a rare sight, but I've seen so many, in so many museums, that I don't figure they will hold much charm for me yet again.
The smallest room in the museum is given over to about 10 vehicles, almost all Chevrolets. The '58 and the '61 interest me but, again, these are cars that I see all over the country, in and out of museums. And besides, the lighting in that room and the arrangement of the cars are such that I can't get a good picture of any of them. The rest of those cars are generally uninteresting to me.
Then there's the back room: large, with dozens of cars of all sorts arranged in groups of 2 or 4, so that it's possible to see all sides of each car. And the lighting is better, too. I spent much longer in that room than in the others. Many of the cars are in that same category of almost commonplace: Mustangs and GTOs and Road Runners and Barracudas -- muscle cars -- are neat to look at, and fond memories abound (especially when I get to the 1970 Chevelle SS'es along the far wall) but they're not worth photographing yet again. I've already got those pictures.
But there are also a number of cars in that back room that I haven't seen frequently in other museums; some I've never seen before. The 1940 Lincoln Zephyr, a really funny-looking car that looks like it got stuck in an extruder. The 1951 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, a peculiarly ugly and chubby-looking luxury car. A 1931 Packard dual-cowl phaeton -- a type of car that has always fascinated me, ever since my days of playing with Matchbox cars.
Coming out of the Horton museum after two hours, the clouds to the north and east had turned ominous, so I left the top up for a couple of hours. Looking at my itinerary, I decided to skip my next planned stop, at Turner Falls in Davis, Oklahoma, because a couple of recent reviews of the place pointed out that the $15 entry fee was pretty steep for what you got. So I plugged in the next planned stop and headed off.
After lunch -- of Arbuckle Fried Pies (one Tex-Mex, one spinach & mushroom) and a chat with an elderly couple from Kent, England, who were touring the country in a rental car -- and a couple of hours' driving (during which I gor exactly three drops of rain on my windshield, so the top came down again), I stopped for a break and, while I stretched my legs, I decided to look ahead to the other planned stops. Doing some quick mental calculations, I realized that (1) my next stop at a museum in Sapulpa, Oklahoma would be at its closing time, and (2) the the remaining stops in Oklahoma would require me to sit around waiting until 11AM tomorrow at the earliest for access. So I said to myself, Self (I said), let's just go on to Kansas. I said, You can look at your paper maps and decide where-all you want to go; get a big-picture view. That's when I realized that I'd left all my paper maps, with their carefully highlighted routes marked out from Texas to Michigan and back, sitting on top of my Windows computer back in San Antonio. AND I'd left behind my old beat-up Rand McNally Road Atlas of the USA because I didn't need it; I had those paper maps.
So I have no big-picture resource at the moment. That caused me a little difficulty this evening when I tried booking a cheap motel in El Dorado, Kansas, and found that, because I was using that tiny little cellphone screen, I'd plugged in a motel in Wichita instead. Not that far distant, but still out of my way. So I stopped at a Wendy's in whatever town I was in at the time, and called for a reservation by phone instead.
I see a visit to the AAA office in Kansas City in my not-too-distant future, for a new set of paper maps. They won't have the routes highlighted, but at least I'll be able to change plans with greater comfort.
I blame my wife, of course, for my having left the maps behind. I'm not saying it's her fault, just that I blame her.
So how to explain the way I feel about today's drive? I feel something akin to joy. Yes, my plan was a near-total bust. I'll not see the car museum in Sapulpa, or the Deco architecture of Tulsa, or the Healing Stone, and I'll have to get my Superman ice cream in Michigan or somewhere like that; and I didn't see the Indians On The Hill or Bluestem Falls or Greenville Avenue. But today's drive was a joy, top-down on mostly small country roads listening to Ron and Clint Howard talk about their childhood. (Clint's voice is a little deeper than Ron's, and on my radio it's kind of hard to hear him speak. At one point I thought he said, talking of someone he worked with on a TV show, "he was accurately known as Fat Dick." I wondered how anyone would know that. Then I heard him say it again, and realized it was "Fat Jack," so presumably he was talking about the man's weight problem, not his endowment.) (I really should take some time to review the equalizer settings on my radio; maybe I'll do that in KC, now that I expect to have an extra day there.)
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