Things Are Looking Up: Day 2 of the 2011 Wisconsin Road Trip

[Some of the photos taken on this trip are posted on line HERE]

Stratford, Texas, at sunrise

I was up early, like 5AM, wide awake, so I got dressed and went out to see the sights of Stratford, Texas, a small panhandle town that, honestly, has no sights. It didn't take long. At least the angle of the light gave mundane things a slight romantic cast, and the cool air was bracing. Rick was up a couple of hours later, and we loaded the car pretty quickly and headed off in search of coffee.

Before we found that, though, we reached Boise City, Oklahoma, where we witnessed the destruction wrought by the US Army Air Corps pilot who accidentally dropped three bombs on the town during a 1943 training mission. Luckily for the town, bombs used during training missions back then weren't live ordnance, so the destruction was mostly to the surface of the earth. One of the bombs has been enshrined as mute testimony to the town's will, in its crater in front of the Chamber of Commerce. The others are in the town's museum collection, which we didn't see.

After that, we drove out to the edge of town to see the city's welcome to visitors from the north. When it was built, these giant sauropods were called brontosaurs, so it probably had some cute diminutive name like Bessy the Bronto. Now they're called apatosaurs, and that just doesn't lend itself to charming iambic phrase. So now it's called The Dinosaur.

Following that, a quick tour of the town revealed that there was only one surviving eatery where we might get coffee and breakfast ... a Subway in the local truck stop. It could've been worse. Much worse. At least breakfast at Subway is a thing of known quality and composition, and the truck stop's coffee was pretty good, and voluminous.

From there we headed northeast, clipping the corner of Texas County (which was why we went that direction in the first place) and then up into unexplored Kansas. We paused briefly to admire the vastness of the grassland in the Cimarron River bottom, then continued north to Wallace, epicenter of a number of battles between the US cavalry and whichever tribe of Indians inhabited the area at the time. I thought it was Arapaho, but there was some Pawnee pottery in the local museum.

The big draw of that museum, though, is its collection of barbed-wire animal sculptures executed by local artisan Ernie Poe ("Ernest E. Poe, if you want to get formal. I don't.") His chef d'oeuvre is the near-life-sized buffalo that stands out front, seven hundred pounds of wire on a steel frame. 

In addition to the museum, the exhibits include a station of the old Butterfield Overland Despatch line that ran through the area, complete with bullet holes and trap door that led to the tunnels that once connected the station with its outlying defenses; a Union Pacific Railway station; and a building built to house the collection of the larger implements of frontier life -- a corn wagon, a chuckwagon, a sleigh, some other carts, a loom, a mock-up of a blacksmith shop, and the various animals that Ernie has built to pose with the vehicles. All in all, an entertaining half hour by the roadside.

Inside the museum were some photographs of people exploring an interesting geological formation called Monument Rocks, which we found out were just a small distance out of our planned way. So we drove over to Oakley, the next town, where we saw the monumental sculpture of Buffalo Bill Cody on a mound,

and the little Fick Museum (which consists of one fascinating fossil exhibit and piles of local craftwork)

and then we drove fourteen miles south to a dirt road that led, after 7 miles, to Monument Rocks, an impressive stand of chalk towers left behind when the land around them eroded away. We spent at least a good hour clambering around in these rocks.

After that slightly mystical experience (you always understand why the Indians thought of these places as "sacred"), we headed north toward Nebraska, stopping for dinner in Oberlin, Kansas, a pleasant Plains city given to variety in its garden plantings of irises.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like Cameron Diaz with a West Texas Drawl

Green Chile Willy's
13651 Interstate 27, at McCormick
Amarillo, Texas

It's just a simple metal building, plopped down between the frontage road and a horse farm. Inside the decor is typical of many Texas restaurants: framed, autographed pictures of local celebrities, some western impedimenta, some old sepia-toned photos. Not a very large place. In fact, not nearly large enough for the crowds it attracts. We got there just in time: we were seated immediately; fifteen minutes later, all the seats in the waiting area were taken.

The menu is as simple as the architecture: fried chicken; chicken fried steak; burgers; and side dishes like fried corn and baked potatoes. I went for the Jalapeño Jack chicken fried steak; my friend Rick opted for the chicken fried chicken.

Our waitress, the title character of this post, greeted us as though we were old friends come to call, but with a degree of sincerity that is hard to fake. When Rick asked for sweet tea, she told him they only had unsweetened, "But can you stick your finger in it?" An old line, but delivered with such unforced charm that it still works. She was attentive throughout our meal, but without hovering. She struck just the right balance between visiting with her customers and getting her work done, and we could see that no one in the place felt any lack of attention from any of the staff.

Both our meals were priced at $11.25, though the menu did claim that all the chicken fried steaks were "Texas sized," and both meals included a salad and one side order. Still, I thought the price a little on the high side. My initial dissatisfaction with that aspect of the visit increased when I found that Texas is not as big in the Panhandle as it is in the rest of the state. I expected a CFS that draped over the sides of a respectable platter; I got one about the size of a dessert plate. Big enough to satisfy the stomach, but not the eyes. I know, I'm better off not having gotten some gigantic slab of breaded meat, but I had kind of been hoping for leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.

See my comment, below,
re the "value" rating

I certainly didn't leave with any sense of dissatisfaction, however. It may not have been the absolute best CFS I've ever had, but it's up there. The breading was a little crunchy, as it should be, and well seasoned; the meat was good quality, and the cream gravy was excellent. The best part of it, though, were the added ingredients of jalapeños and shredded Monterrey Jack cheese, which were present in just great enough quantity to add their flavours to the mix with clarity, not intruding on the simple pleasure of CFS with cream gravy, but augmenting it. Rick's chicken fried chicken had the same combination of ingredients, and was equally tasty. 

The side dishes were done with a precise hand. Simple foods like these are hard to screw up, but also hard to excel at. Yet the kitchen at Green Chile Willy's Grill has excelled. The green beans I had were fresh, cooked long enough to be tender but not so long as to get mushy, and seasoned with a tangy mixture of spices that does not appear to include bacon or fatback. They were delicious. And Rick's baked potato was large but perfectly baked, with plenty of the toppings that make a baked potato so heart-clogging good. 

The kitchen at Green Chile Willy's is geared toward speed. Salads, condiments, toppings and such are packaged in the slow times for quick delivery when the crowds start pouring in, but they achieve that speed without sacrificing appreciably on quality. It's a good thing, because the lines are out the door.

And the Adventure Begins!

The start of a Road Trip is such a dull affair these days. This is because I live pretty much in the middle of Texas, and have to get through the rest of it before I get to any New Territory.

This trip, at least, is exciting for Rick, who's coming with me to Wisconsin, and who has never ever been beyond Junction (except for six weeks in Basic Training on an air base in Amarillo, but he never got off base in that whole time). So we're driving along through the more or less unremarkable landscape between San Antonio and the Oklahoma line, and he found things to look at. It helps to have new things to look at, even if it's all flat, treeless expanse. And we did have a dust storm to liven things up briefly; at one point it was heavy enough to drop visibility almost to zero. But that only lasted a few hundred yards.

We left San Antonio around 8 this morning, after I dropped Homer off at his kennel. Breakfast was in Boerne, at the Bear Moon Cafe on Main Street, which until this stop has always been a favourite of mine. Today, though, I found the coffee too strong and the scones disappointing. The cranberry scone was like eating bread, with a heavy but not crunchy crust; the buttermilk scone was like eating cake. Day-old cake. 

We loaded an audiobook into the CD player and set off down the freeway. The book is P.D. James' A Taste for Death, one of her Adam Dalgliesh series. I've never read any of her work. It's by far the longest audiobook we got from the library, at 22 hours, but that's not entirely from the languid pace of the action. I find James also has a knack for elegantly simple and concise description. My favourite sentence so far, describing a character's reaction to the discovery of two bodies, was "Blood spattered against the retinas of her closed eyes." Evocative and succinct.

So in Junction we stopped to see the Deer Horn Tree. I didn't expect much of it, but that's about all there is to see in a place like Junction. Sure enough, a tree made out of deer horns. Well, we had to stop anyway, to put the top down.

Pearl of the Conchos and
Celebration Bridge

After that it was on to San Angelo. I'd been to the art museum at San Angelo a few years back, to see a travelling exhibit of paintings from some small but renowned museum in Connecticut. Right behind that museum (and I don't know if it was there at the time) is a park in the floodplain of the Concho River, and in the river, next to the new-looking Celebration Bridge, is a statue of a mermaid holding an oyster, in which is a giant pearl. The statue is called The Pearl of the Conchos. Not great art, but a nice statue in a very nice setting. Nice enough that we had a relaxing picnic lunch of the sandwiches we had brought from home.

Our next stop -- this will show you just how hard it is to find interesting things to see along the routes of western Texas -- was in Big Spring, where we were led to believe exist the world's largest pair of horns. It's only a block out of our way, so I wasn't too terribly disappointed to find that the horns are no longer there. Just an empty pavilion on the grounds of the Heritage Museum. Well, maybe they've moved the horns indoors. I suppose that if I had the world's largest horns, I'd want to protect them from the elements and rival claimants. 

The rest of the trip today, with the exception of the dust storm, was unremarkable. It's now nearly 10pm and we are ensconced in the "party room" of the Stratford Inn, in Stratford, Texas. The "party room" is called that because it has four queen-sized beds in it. I sure hope we aren't woken up in the middle of the night by a small but determined band of  Stratford's hardest-core partiers.