July 12th - Amarillo, Texas

The hot breakfast promised for our hotel was, in truth, hot—everyone was given exactly one plate of fresh scrambled eggs, two sausage links, and three slices of toast. Juice was available, but no cereal or milk, so some of the parents walked to the Krispy Kreme donut shop next door for something their children would eat. Still, it was freshly cooked and gave us sufficient energy for our morning walk in Amarillo.

The Route 66 walk in Amarillo wandered west thru a park and residential district before turning south to follow the border of a golf course. The first checkpoint was the St. Hyacinth church, which surprised me because I really didn’t know there were saints named after flowers. In the park we saw a pair of hawks apparently trying to get at a mockingbird’s nest. They were basically gray with white underneath—different from any hawk I have seen out east and quite pretty. Monika saw the mockingbird chasing one of them away while I was taking pictures of the other one perched in a tree, so we both had a good look at them.

As we passed along subdivision streets we were surprised to see large diamond-shaped signs with custom printing mounted on posts in the yards. The sayings ranged from the first line of songs or the poem “Jabberwocky” to idiosyncratic phrases that had no obvious meaning for us. Monika saw two signs on neighboring homes, one saying “Noisy Kids” and the other one claiming “Quiet Place”. I’m not sure what all was exactly going on in Amarillo to spark these signs, but the people there seem to have a sense of humor and the signs surely did add entertainment to the walk.

The last 1/3 of the walk was an in-and-out along the old Route 66 corridor. We saw some of the old Route 66 gasoline stations that had been converted to stores or boutiques. In general the most common shops were the antique stores, and we stopped to look in one that had a bubble machine blowing bubbles outside the front door—a unique advertising gimmick I thought. The checkpoint for this leg was a huge swimming pool from the 1920s that had been converted in the 1930s to a huge dance hall, and was now falling into ruin. Who would have expected that on Route 66?

Altho it was only 10 o’clock, it was getting hot as we finished the walk, and we would certainly recommend that anyone doing this walk in the summer consider doing it in the morning and taking plenty of water. The route is quite flat but sidewalks are lacking in many areas, so much so that I was wondering if “Amarillo” meant “walk in the street” in Texan, so you would also be well-advised to wear good shoes. Of course any serious student of foreign languages knows I’m just kidding about Texan—a professional philologist would carefully decompose this word to find its true meaning. For example, “Amarillo” can be decomposed into “A—marillo” which clearly means without marillos, like in the old 1930s song, “Yes we have no marillos, we have no marillos today!” In any case, the neighborhoods that you walk thru on this Volksmarch are nice—folks greeted us warmly—and the old Route 66 buildings are interesting, particularly if you like antiques.

We climbed back into the truck and cooled off while we drove west to Oklahoma City where we planned our walk for the following morning. After finding a (cheap) motel we drove over to the starting point at the gift shop in Myriad Botanical Gardens to sign in because it was not open until noon the next day, Sunday, when we wanted to do the walk. That accomplished, we found a 2 sub sandwich for $4 deal at Arby’s for dinner and retired to our motel room for a relaxing evening of TV news, journal writing, and reading.