Having walked through downtown santa Fe last night, I didn't feel like we needed another full day, so we decided to move on to Amarillo. This would put us two days ahead of schedule. We spent the morning at the outdoor pool, making up for the hours of just sitting in the car, and eating American food.
I used Urbanspoon again look up a good brunch place. Harry's Roadhouse topped the list, but it was a ways out of downtown and close to the highway, so we walked back to browse some of the downtown shops a bit more before leaving. The shops were mostly closed the night before, so it was a bit different to actually walk into some of the shops. There were an abundance of art galleries, as well as shops selling kitschy knick-knacks. Native american themes were popular, but there was a huge variety as well, both in art and widgets.
While looking up hotels for Santa Fe, there were a lot of upscale options, upwards of $300 a night. It was interesting to note that the people browsing around town mostly seemed to be elderly and well off, or young and dressed like punks or white-trash. While walking around, the fancy hotels didn't really stick out. They must have been located outside of the downtown plaza a bit. Though not dumpy, the downtown didn't seem too upscale either, except for the prices on some of the pieces in some galleries, and the prices of the local gourmet cupcakes. Dream Cakes sold $4.50 cupcakes. That's $0.75 more than Los Angeles. Unfortunatly, it was closed for the one day we were in town, so we didn't get to sample it. Maybe that wasn't too unfortunate, otherwise I might need to do quite a few more laps at the pool.
By the time we got to Harry's, breakfast was no longer served. Dissapoined but hungry, we went for the lunch fare, which was still good, though mayber not amazing. Healthy options were available, which was a good thing, since dinner would be BBQ in Amarillo.
Most of the afternoon was on the road. Again, lightning flashed in the distance. We drove through two 3-minute downpours which cleaned off the windshield again. Otherwise, the drive was mostly sunny, straight, flat and boring. The landscape slowly got greener. First the brush, which eventually got replaced by trees and gold grass as we moved from New Mexico to Texas. The red mesas in the distance eventually disappeared into the rearview, and grazing cows and cornfields became the norm along the higway.
As we pulled into Amarillo, we stopped by the Cadillac Ranch, an art exhibit of sorts, of 10 Caddilacs half-buried vertically in a field. Around are strewn cans of spray paint. If you're lucky enough to find one that's not yet empty, you can contribute to the painting of the cars. After a few photos, we moved on to Tyler's Barbeque. We got in before closing, and had a taste of authentic Texan BBQ, complete with a smokey crust of dry rub over some tender, but extremely lean brisket, and some of the best ribs I've had. I would have preferried a fattier brisket, but overall the food was great, and pretty cheap. Tyler was very friendly, and came out to chat with the patrons of the order-at-the-counter restaurant. It wasn't as busy as I expected, but it was also earlier to closing time than I had expected. We had passed through another time zone without realizing it.
We didn't do much more exploring of Amarillo, but we did find a ghetto laundromat to do our laundry, while lightining flashed overhead, rather silently.
No comments:
Post a Comment